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Vision and Service 



BY 

JOHN BALCOM SHAW, D.D., LL.D, 



AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY 

NEW YORK 









UfirfARY of CONGRESS 
Two Cortes Received 
SEP 24 I90f 



^ Ceoyrtfht Entiy 
ClX$S4 



7 

XXc, Ne. 
COPY B. 



Copyright, 1907, 
By American Tract Society 



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CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Vision and Service .... 7 

The White Signal ...... 23 

A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel . 37 

The Old and the New .... 53 

The Blind Man's Vision ... 71 

The Church in a New Light . . 85 

The Secret of Jesus' Life ... 97 

The Place of Fear in Religion . 115 

Soul Re-Winning . . . . . 127 

One Step at a Time . . . ,. 147 



VISION AND SERVICE 



"And it came to pass in those days, that 
He went out into a mountain to pray, and 
continued all night in prayer to God." 

Luke vi. 12 

"And He came down with them, and 
stood in the plain. ' * 

Luke vi. iy 



VISION AND SERVICE 

THE ascent into the mountain was for 
vision; the descent into the plain 
for service. Vision and service — 
this was the dual secret of our Lord's life; 
vision always impelling Him to service, and 
service demanding a vision for its guidance 
and inspiration. One hand, that nearest His 
heart, was ever upstretched into the blue, 
keeping hold upon the unseen and the eternal ; 
while the other, the right hand, which is the 
hand of dexterity and service, was out- 
stretched into the world around Him, feeling 
for its need and giving itself to its fulfill- 
ment. 

Christian character and Christian work 
know no other secret with us than this — vision 



io Vision and Service 

and service. Surely, vision is ever man's high- 
est and deepest need. As the sage of old 
phrased it, 

" Where there is no vision the people perish." 

Their ideals fall like the stone god in 
Dagon's temple, the stars go out from the 
soul's firmament, motive deteriorates, char- 
acter disintegrates, duty is no longer a high 
and holy word, and life becomes an empty, 
aimless, nerveless, fruitless thing. 

What is vision? First of all a look up- 
ward. " Man," said Sabatier, " is incurably 
religious." No less true is Miss Muloch's 
dictum, " An irreligious woman is an anom- 
aly " ; that is to say, born with a soul, there is 
but one atmosphere in which we thrive, the 
air which blows from off the eternal hills. 
We may ignore our religious nature, but we 
cannot eradicate it. It is within us to stay; 
it must be reckoned with ; it demands a hear- 
ing, and sooner or later will get it. 

What is it that distinguishes man from 
the rest of creation? "His mind," you 
promptly say; but have not brutes mind? 
So simple an insect as the mosquito exer- 



Vision and Service 1 1 

cises, as we have all had abundant occasion 
to realize, the most discriminating fore- 
thought and cunning. If you tell me that 
by mind you mean reason, you will have to 
change your answer yet again. Have you 
never seen a horse or a dog think, calculate, 
and decide ? Memory is the elephant's forte, 
as it is not most men's. Nor can you dif- 
ferentiate man by calling him a speaking 
animal, for many brutes utter articulate 
sounds. 

No, it is not that man thinks or reasons or 
talks or laughs that he is different from other 
animals. These are his two distinguishing 
characteristics : ( i ) That he is a worship- 
ing animal — he may talk with his Maker; 
he must talk with his Maker. (2) That 
God talks with him. Never does the Crea- 
tor talk with the mountains or the sea or 
the rivers ; His sole means of communication 
with them are His fixed laws — cold, mute, 
inarticulate laws. These He ordained at the 
beginning, and ever since they have uttered 
His exclusive message to the inanimate world. 
The voice in which He expresses Himself 
to the brute creation is instinct — what Her- 



12 Vision and Service 

bert Spencer calls " leaden instinct." These 
tell His irrational creatures all that He has 
to say to them. 

Made to speak with God and to be spoken 
to by God, what must man deteriorate into 
without a vision? He becomes a degenerate, 
a moral pervert, a spiritual dwarf, an Esau 
who has sold his birthright and is running 
away from home. Kepler felt this when, 
looking up into the heavens, he exclaimed, 
" I think Thy thoughts after Thee, O God! " 
Browning felt it when he wrote those strong, 
vital words: 

" But, I need now, as then, 
Thee, God, that mouldest men." 

True to the eternal verities was that in- 
scription in the noble Memorial Chapel of 
the Leland Stanford University, so recently 
and ruthlessly destroyed: " There is no nar- 
rowness so deadly as narrowness of spiritual 
vision." 

In order, then, to fulfill the highest need 
of our being, we must be men and women 
of vision. And when the vision comes to 
us, immediately shall we be impelled to serv- 



Vision and Service 13 

ice. The atmosphere of the unseen world is 
charged with love, and in inbreathing it we 
imbibe the spirit of service. Service is God's 
highest passion. He created the world that 
He might express Himself to others; He 
inspired the scriptures that they might bet- 
ter utter His thoughts; He planned the In- 
carnation that through the human life of 
His Son He might serve His creatures in 
a higher form. Therefore, when man climbs 
the mount and looks up into the face of his 
God, he is forthwith driven down from the 
mount into the plain to stand among the 
people. Charles Loring Brace heard Horace 
Bushnell's great sermon and, being brought 
as never before into the presence of God, he 
felt the summons to service and immediately 
gave his life to the world-renowned work 
with which his name will ever be associated. 
Wendell Phillips, brought into closer touch 
with God through the ministry of Lyman 
Beecher, went home to dedicate himself to 
the service of humanity. He who knows 
God, and only he, can live the life 

" Whose throbs are love, 
Whose thrills are song." 



14 Vision and Service 

Humboldt tells us that after bathing 
among the Noctilucae in the phosphorescent 
waters of the South Pacific his person was 
luminous for hours, and another has reported 
a valley in the interior of Persia so excep- 
tionally and exquisitely fragrant that persons 
upon emerging therefrom carry its odor upon 
their garments for days afterwards. I can- 
not long practice the presence of God with- 
out having the light of His love stream out 
from my person, and its perfume breathe 
itself forthwith into and through my life. 

But vision is more than a look upward; it 
is equally a look forward. The author of 
the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us that the 
secret of Moses' life was that he " saw Him 
who is invisible," and also that " he had re- 
spect unto (looked away to) the recompense 
of reward." That is to say, in a perpetual 
vision he saw God, and he also gazed far 
into the future. 

This forward vision may not always see 
the eternal consequences of life; it is often 
enough if it gives the temporal perspective 
of things. A boy grows forward into the 
years with no strong ambition controlling 



Vision and Service 15 

him. He is one of a hundred other lads of 
the town. But suddenly an impulse seizes 
him. He sees what he can be. He knows 
what he wants to be. Was it what Mrs. 
Browning calls 

A dream dreamt right in a world gone wrong " ? 

Or was it the outgrowth of the nature 
given him by his parents? Or was it God's 
summons to a foreordained task? Describe 
it as you may, it was a star he had never 
seen in his firmament before, an inspiring 
look into the future years, a vision of a pos- 
sible goal hitherto unseen by him. He begins 
at once to climb toward it. His books have 
a new delight for him. His eyes set all the 
while upon the star, every year brings him 
nearer and nearer to the goal, until, college 
done and the subsequent training over, he 
steps at length into the glory of a distin- 
guished and useful career. Had the boy 
never had his vision, he would never have 
been heard of, and vision for him was a 
look ahead. Mrs. Burnett, in her recent 
book, calls this " the dawn of a to-morrow." 



1 6 Vision and Service 

It is a story of a London merchant who gives 
his name at the lodging house as Anthony 
Dart. He is bent upon suicide. One day 
standing upon London Bridge contemplating 
his intention, he accidentally drops a gold 
sovereign, when what had seemed before 
nothing but a bundle of rags leaning up 
against the pier darts forward and, seizing 
it with alacrity, looks up into his face as if 
begging to be allowed to keep it. Of what 
use was money to one so soon to take his 
life? He gives it to the girl, and the only 
way in which she feels she can express her 
gratitude is to lead him away from his in- 
tended purpose. She succeeds in getting him 
to follow her through the narrow streets and 
lanes, up into her garret room. With the 
money he had given her she soon kindles 
the first fire which the garret had known for 
weeks, and, spreading out a supply of food, 
calls in her pauper neighbors to share in her 
good fortune. As Anthony beholds this 
scene, there comes to him a vision in a Lon- 
don garret which he never had in his metro- 
politan mansion. He sees what his fortune 
can do to relieve human distress, and he 



Vision and Service 17 

forthwith begins the career which makes him 
as famous a benefactor as he was before a 
merchant — Sir Oliver Holt, one of London's 
best-loved citizens. 

The " dawn of a to-morrow " has never 
any other sequel but that of service. We 
cannot climb the mountain and look forward 
into the future without coming down and 
standing with the people in the plain. 

Vision has yet another element entering 
into it. It is also a look around, an insight 
into the life of one's age, sympathy with the 
needs, the hopes, the joys, the burdens and 
sins of humanity about us. Charles Lamb 
told Coleridge he could never visit the Strand 
without shedding great tears of joy at the 
abounding life he saw about him on all sides. 
Its richer, fairer side spoke loudest to him. 
Had his vision been complete he would have 
seen at the same time another and darker 
picture, and some of the tears he shed would 
have been those of sorrow. We need to see 
both of these sides; we cannot keep normal 
and balanced unless we do. With only the 
first in sight we become morbid and pessi- 
mistic; without the latter our optimism is 



1 8: Vision and Service 

neither sane nor wholesome. And, which- 
ever we see, if our vision be the true one it 
will elicit sympathy. We shall rejoice with 
those that rejoice, and mourn with those that 
mourn. We shall become so interested in 
human life, so concerned for humanity, that 
our highest desire will be to serve the world 
about us. Blucher upon his first visit to 
London after the battle of Waterloo was 
taken, among other sights, to see the World's 
Metropolis from the dome of St. Paul's Ca- 
thedral. As he looked over the vast expanse 
of roofs and chimneys, the narrator tells us, 
he leaned far over the iron railing and ex- 
claimed, " Oh, what a place for plunder!" 
Such a man could have had no outward vision 
of the world's real life. The visionless men 
and women of to-day are legion who, looking 
out into the world around them, have but 
one thought, not what they can put into it, 
but what they can get out of it — gain, lux- 
ury, comfort, ease, pleasure. Let them but 
climb the mountain and look off upon the 
real life of their times as it is throbbing and 
teeming all about them, and they cannot 
long remain on the summit, but must hasten 



Vision and Service 19 

down and stand with the people in the 
plain. 

Several years ago, I spent a good part of 
one Sunday afternoon on Calvary. Senti- 
ment at first, very naturally, had control, and 
while in the midst of the deepest and holiest 
reverie I was interrupted by the approach 
of a flock of sheep that were grazing their 
way up the slope, and finally came so near 
as fairly to pluck the spears of grass beneath 
my feet. Fearing they might disturb me, 
their thoughtful shepherd in his picturesque 
oriental garb interposed and drove them 
away. Cast thereby into a still deeper rev- 
erie, I opened my Bible and began to read 
the familiar pastoral passages of the Good 
Shepherd and His sheep, and when wrapped 
in fond meditation I was again interrupted, 
this time by a band of beggars who had 
divined my mood and would take advantage 
of it. Could I turn them away? How could 
I on " the hill called Calvary " ? As they 
stood before me in their penury, Christ 
seemed to appear amid the group and to ad- 
dress me and not them. " Even here come 
the want and woe of humanity," I heard Him 



20 Vision and Service 

say. " Spend not your time in idle, selfish 
reverie. The world is calling you. Only as 
my disciples learn here the great lesson of 
Calvary and, breathing in its spirit, go down 
into the world to love it, to live for it and, 
if need be, to die for it, only so can that world 
be redeemed." Rebuked by His words, I 
closed my Bible and went down into the city 
again, singing in my heart, if not audibly with 
my lips : 

" Must Jesus bear the cross alone, 
And all the world go free? 
No, there's a cross for every one, 
And there's a cross for me. 

" The consecrated cross I'll bear 
Till death shall set me free, 
And then go home my crown to wear, 
For there's a crown for me." 



If each of these three phases of a true 
vision prompts those who have it to service, 
how can he to whom the full vision has come, 
who, climbing the mount, has beheld the face 
of God, gazed on into the future, and looked 
off upon the world about him — how can he 
resist the call the plain below makes to him? 



Vision and Service 21 

An American poet has expressed this truth 
in striking language: 

" I had so much to ask of Christ 

Before I saw His face. 
Long years, contentment, peace unpriced, 

Joy in His dwelling-place. 
But when my lips had kissed His feet, 

None of my needs I pled. 
'Let but my love make answer meet 

To Thy dear love,' I said. 

" I had so much to ask of man, 

Honor and joy and power, 
Praise for my life's perfected plan, 

Help for my battle hour. 
But when mine ears had heard the cry 

Of flesh and blood for bread, 
'Let me be spent, endure and die, 

Brothers, with you,' I said." 

Vision and service, then, belong together. 
They cannot exist apart, but are as dependent 
upon each other as are now our physical and 
spiritual natures. Let vision fail to express 
itself in service, and it ceases to be vision. l 
Let service try to exercise itself without first 
getting its vision, it will lose its title to the 
name. There is no lesson our age needs 
more to learn than this. It is because the 



22 Vision and Service 

Church has not learned it or, learning it, has 
not applied it, that she suiters in so many 
quarters from indifference and opposition. 
She has been too content to climb the moun- 
tain and stay there while the people were 
crying loudly for help on the plain below. A 
like fault can be charged against many mod- 
ern organizations at work outside the Church. 
They make so little progress and secure such 
meager returns because they have gone to 
work, in so many instances, without first seek- 
ing a vision, or without waiting for the full 
vision. It may be they have climbed the 
mount and looked off upon the world's need, 
but they are not doing their work " as see- 
ing Him who is invisible " or with the unseen 
and the eternal straight before them. 



THE WHITE SIGNAL 



"Thou hast been faithful over a few 
things, I will make thee ruler over many 
things; enter thou into the joy of thy 
Lord." 

Matthew xxv. 21 



THE WHITE SIGNAL 

yg$ our boat rounded the point and the 
ZJ great harbor came into sight, there 
*JL JL lay before us one dazzling stretch 
of variegated lights, some near and some far 
away. Had I been at the wheel, I would 
have grown confused and rung to the engi- 
neer to slow down. Not so our captain. He 
was as self-possessed as a sentinel on duty, 
and, if anything, the vessel quickened her 
speed instead of slackening it. Presently, 
seeing there were no stars to steer by, for it 
was a cloudy night, I ventured to ask the 
captain which of the lights he was shaping 
his course to. " That little white light far- 
thest in at the right/' he said, and dropped 
once more into his wonted silence. Fearing 
25 



2(3 Vision and Service 

to interrupt him again, I began to study the 
lights for myself, and the reason for his 
choice soon became clear. The other signals 
were larger and more brilliant and therefore 
easier to locate, but many of them moved 
with the craft to which they were suspended 
and none of them seemed stationary, but the 
white light up at the end of the row was 
fixed and steady and evidently could be de- 
pended upon. As we bore down upon the 
wharf, it revealed itself to be a government 
signal set just at the edge of the channel 
and on a line with the landing dock, so that 
by pointing toward it no captain could fail 
to land his vessel easily and safely. 

Thus I learned that night my first lesson 
in piloting — thanks to the reticence of the 
old captain — yes, and the first principle of 
soul-steering, too. For many and varied are 
the signals along the religious horizon, and 
if we would keep to the right course we must 
be careful which we steer by. 

Straight ahead, always in sight, and flash- 
ing its striking color against the dark back- 
ground, is the blue light of orthodoxy — the 
right creed, a proper religious sentiment, an 



The White Signal 27 

approved intellectual attitude. Only believe 
right, it seems to say to us, and you are safe. 
And there on the port side is another daz- 
zling signal, the yellow light of impulse, emo- 
tion, aspiration, gleaming out large and 
luminous upon the waters. Only feel right, 
and you may be sure you are in the channel. 
Still another light gleaming out over the 
waters is the red signal of convention, form 
and ceremony. But none of these lights, 
brilliant as they are, mark the main channel, 
and there would be peril in shaping the soul's 
course by them. 

Look sharply, and just at your right, seem- 
ingly far ahead, but in reality very near, so 
small that you have to search for it, but al- 
ways burning steadily, is the little white light 
of duty, which because it is fixed and con- 
stant can be depended upon day in and day 
out, night after night, the year around and 
life through. Steer by that, and you are sure 
to keep in the channel where the current is 
deep and to make the right landing stage. 
God's authoritative hand set this signal along 
life's shore and keeps it duly trimmed and 
tended, so that it may never go out. 



28 1 Vision and Service 

More and more am I persuaded that the 
chief citadel of my religious life is the con- 
science; that the most likely place for me 
to find God is in the little duties which He 
has given me. Let me be faithful in these, 
let me live up to the light He has given me, 
and I shall come to a fuller knowledge of 
Him and a closer relation with Him than 
if I trusted myself to creed-saying or im- 
pulse-making. How apt we all are to be 
looking for some larger and more brilliant 
light to shape our course to — an ecstatic ex- 
perience, an unusual rapture, or a distinguish- 
ing achievement, something above the com- 
monplace and out of the ordinary. Heading 
the prow in that direction, we soon find our- 
selves in shallow water, and, unless we are 
master-captains, will run our boat upon the 
shoals. In fine, the highest word in all the 
language of life is duty. 



Do thy duty, that is best. 
Leave unto thy God the rest," 



as the old monk sang, and God will shape 
for your life the highest and noblest ends. 



The White Signal 29 

" Straight is the line of duty, 
Curved is the line of beauty. 
Follow the straight line, thou shalt see 
The curved line ever follows thee." 



Now to appreciate this truth, we must drop 
the poetic and become prosaic and common- 
place. Let us be baldly simple at this point, 
then. You feel yourself a downright drudge 
—nothing but a drudge. You have only a 
clerk's position with tiresome routine day 
after day, which you say is enough to rob 
any man of aspiration. Your wage is small, 
your firm unappreciative and your prospect 
of advance long since gone. " What chance 
have I," you say to yourself daily, " to be 
anything worth while in such a position?" 
That, I admit, is as difficult a harbor to make 
as any along the coast. You will lose the 
channel unless you steer right. Lay your 
course to the signal of duty. Say to yourself 
a thousand times a day: I must be honest 
and true and brave and cheerful. I owe it 
to myself. I owe it to my family and, above 
all, to my God. Will it really matter in the 
end what the firm has said or done? Will it 
matter at last whether you have been rich or 



30 Vision and Service 

just lived from hand to mouth? What shall 
the Master say? Ah, that is the question. 
Be it your ambition to win this word: " Thou 
hast been faithful over a few things, I will 
make thee ruler over many things; enter 
thou into the joy of thy Lord." 

Or you are a hard-driven business man, 
making money, yes, but for that very reason 
under the heaviest pressure. The competi- 
tion is fierce and honesty hard. Your salva- 
tion, my busy friend, lies in the enthrone- 
ment of the conscience. You may be never so 
zealous for the Kingdom, most punctilious in 
church obligations and unquestionably sound 
in the faith, but these will be of no avail if you 
are not true to yourself, your higher, better 
self. What Lincoln said in his world-famed 
Cooper Union speech you and I need to say 
to one another daily: "Let us dare to do 
our duty as we understand it." Oh, the 
blessedness of a man who goes to his bed at 
night with a conscience void of offense toward 
God and man ! 

Or, still staying down close to everyday 
life, you are the over-worked mother of a 
large family. Little did you think that night 



The White Signal 31 

of the gay wedding that a few years could 
rob life of so much of its poetry. There is 
no respite for you these days, no diversion, 
no let-up of strain and responsibility and care. 
How often you sigh for something larger 
and more achieving in life. You look away 
to the brilliant lights that are shining beyond 
and long for the time when you can steer life's 
course to them. Will the time never come 
when you can belong to a woman's club, or 
help do the church work, or shine in society? 
Don't look away. It will make you restless, 
unhappy, and blind to duty. Keep your eye 
on the little steady white light — your ob- 
ligation to those children — there is nothing 
higher; your duty to your husband; your 
contribution to the domestic life of the na- 
tion; your part in shaping the character of 
the next generation. Only in that direction 
is there deep water. All others lead to the 
shoals. Of mothers, even more than of gen- 
erals like Wellington, might Tennyson sing: 

" Not once or twice in our fair island-story, 
The path of duty was the way to glory." 

Or worst of all — let me choose my words 
here — you sometimes think you made a mis- 



32 Vision and Service 

take in marrying. The romance of courtship 
has faded into the commonplace of connu- 
bial toleration, if not incompatibility. The 
woman whom you thought flawless has been 
discovered to have her faults and many of 
them. The husband you once felt proud to 
give your heart to is indifferent and dissi- 
pated. You have been ashamed of him more 
than once lately. Do you chafe under the 
bondage of it all? Are you tempted to do 
something desperate? Then you are out of 
the channel. You are missing the one safe 
light. Obligation — not sentiment or ro- 
mance or personal ease, or even happiness — 
is the word for you to conjure with. A home 
built upon a love that is sentimental, emo- 
tional, physical, passionate, is a house on 
the sand, which the least domestic gale will 
blow down. But build your home upon 
honor, obligation, the duty of wifehood, hus- 
bandhood and parenthood, and your home is 
a castle founded upon the rock that nothing 
can overthrow. 

" I slept and dreamed that life was beauty, 
I awoke and found that life was duty." 
Was thy dream, then, a shadowy lie? 



The White Signal 33 

Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly, 
And thou shalt find thy dream to be 
A truth and noonday light to thee. 

" But you are putting the primary accent 
in religion upon morality," you say with 
alarm. Of course I am. Since when was it 
an error to do that? You can talk about the 
baptism of the Holy Spirit till your death 
day, but if duty is not the signal-light of your 
life, if you are not faithful in little things, 
your religion is vain and you are as far away 
from Jesus Christ as midnight is from noon- 
day. 

There is no true religion that is not based 
upon morality; yes, religion grows out of 
morality as a flower grows out of the stalk. 
As some one has said, " The course of the 
Christian is from small moral matters up to 
large religious ones." The Episcopal Church 
is true to the truth of things and at once 
ethically and theologically sound when it 
makes its catechumens say: " To do my 
duty in that state of life unto which it shall 
please God to call me." Why can we not 
all say that without having to fall back upon 
a catechism? Emerson's dictum has never 



34 Vision and Service 

been superseded. He was heretical in other 
matters but not in this. Write the words in 
fire across your soul: "Virtue is the essence 
of all religion. When a man says, * I ought,' 
then will he worship and be enlarged by his 
worship." 

" Stern daughter of the voice of God, 
O Duty! 

Stern law-giver ! Yet thou dost wear 
The Godhead's most benignant grace. 
Nor know we anything so fair 
As is the smile upon thy face. 

" Flowers laugh before thee in their beds, 
And fragrance in thy footing treads. 
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong, 
And the most ancient heavens through thee 
Are fresh and strong." 

Duty, then, is the starting-point of a true 
religious life; it is also its guide and gov- 
ernor; its preceptor and trainer, leading us 
on into the higher, farther lessons of life. 

( i ) The first of these is obedience. Meet- 
ing the lower obligations in faithfulness, they 
become to us " stepping stones that slope 
through darkness up to God." Duty to 
others leads us on to duty to our Maker. 
None are so loyal to Jesus Christ, none so 



The White Signal 35 

submissive to God's authority, as those who 
have been schooled to respect the claims of 
earthly relationships and come on gradually 
to accept the claims of the divine and eternal. 
When a father makes his boy mind he is 
teaching him the first lesson in religion. 

(2) Faith is the next outcome of this 
training. Who has ever taken duty for his 
master, set himself to faithfulness, without 
feeling forthwith his incompetency for even 
the little obligations and being forced to look 
above him for help? The descent of duty 
is ever followed by the ascent of faith. Pro- 
fessor Peabody in his last book * says, " Two 
ways run parallel in every life, a way of duty 
and a way of faith." 

(3) And the third child of this parentage 
is love. Law and love are tied inseparably 
together in the religious world. What is 
spiritual love? Let one more competent than 
I answer: "Love is righteousness applied 
to happiness. It is not mystical rapture; it 
is not passive acceptance; it is duty done with 
joy. To love God is not an act of the heart 
and soul only, but of the mind and strength; 

* Jesus Christ and the Christian Character. 



36 Vision and Service 

a rational and effective affection." * Love has 
its seat, not in the emotions, but the will. 
As our old college preacher used to say: 
" We must love an earthly being to obey him, 
but we must obey God to love Him." One 
greater than either put it thus : " Love is 
the fulfilling of the law " — that is to say, 
its resultant, its goal, its final unfolding. 

What better preparatory school than this? 
Nay, it is not a school; it is life's highest 
university whose diploma is the most valu- 
able I can acquire. Let me come forth into 
life from out such training — faith, obedience, 
love— and I am well equipped for all that 
it may bring to me. Goethe's motto, strange 
to say, is wonderfully orthodox: 

"Like a star 
That shines afar, 
Without haste, without rest, 
So let us move, 
With steady sway, 
Around the task 
That rules our day, 
And do our best." 

* Peabody in Jesus Christ and the Christian Character, 
p. 125. 



A SEASIDE VISION AND 
ITS SEQUEL 



"He lodgeth with one Simon a tan- 
ner, whose house is by the seaside/' 

Acts x. 6 



A SEASIDE VISION AND 
ITS SEQUEL 

r>/ IMON PETER on a visit to Joppa, 
i \ enjoying a sojourn at the seashore! 
*<J When he was at Lydda, only a few 
miles from here, Dorcas had died, and the 
disciples at Joppa, saddened and confused by 
this bereavement, had sent urging him to 
come to their relief. Peter responded at once, 
and upon reaching the stricken circle, miracu- 
lously restored the lamented Dorcas. This 
done, he decided to change his former plans 
and remain for a while in Joppa, the influences 
that moved him probably being the need that 
the impression produced by the miracle should 
be followed up and made to yield tangible re- 
sults, and the urgent insistence of the disciples 
there that he should tarry with them for a 

39 



40 Vision and Service 

while and strengthen their hands, together, 
possibly, with a strong personal inclination 
to seize the auspicious opportunity and take 
a brief breathing spell before resuming his 
missionary travels. Having reached this de- 
cision, he wisely chose for his headquarters 
the home of Simon, a tanner, which was lo- 
cated down by the sea. 

Peter's sojourn here, brief as it proved to 
be, was one of the most critical and impor- 
tant periods of his life. It is interesting to 
us not only because of the events which it 
witnessed, but also on account of the sugges- 
tions it makes to Christian workers who for 
any reason may have occasion to be away 
from home on a sojourn, particularly to those 
who are in the habit of taking a summer 
holiday, whether it be spent at the seashore 
or in the mountains. 

How did Peter employ his time at Joppa ? 
What did he find to do at the seashore ? The 
Sacred Canon does not tell us that he went 
bathing, or boating, or fishing — such items 
were not necessary to the narrative — but that 
is no reason why we should believe that he 
did not. Peter was human, unusually human, 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 41 

we sometimes think, and undoubtedly en- 
joyed recreation as much as any one. For 
a man who had been a fisherman all his early 
days to lodge by the sea — a real sea this time, 
and no inland lake like Gennesaret, which did 
not deserve the name — without trying his 
hand at the line or net once more and launch- 
ing a boat to see what the difference between 
a sea and lake might be, was an improbability, 
almost an impossibility. And if he did, there 
was nothing undignified or unholy in his 
course. It did him good. It prepared him 
for more effective service. It sent him away 
from Joppa with a quicker step and a lighter 
heart, with greater vigor of mind and body 
both. 

All Christian workers need a vacation, and 
there is nothing that indicates a lack of con- 
secration in their taking one, or a lack of 
dignity or decorum in their enjoying it to the 
full. Recreation is absolutely necessary for 
everybody, and the best kind of recreation is 
the kind that relaxes. It is one thing to take 
a vacation and another thing to spend it 
aright. To rest well is an art, an enviable 
art, and is as important as the art of working 



42 Vision and Service 

well. Doubtless, if we knew the facts, we 
should find that Peter's example at Joppa 
was a safe one to follow, and gave us a war- 
rant to get all we could out of our summer 
sojournings; but we do not need such a war- 
rant. We have it in the constitution of man ; 
we have it in the drain and depletion incident 
to the remainder of the year; we have it in 
the restless, exciting conditions of our modern 
life. 

Therefore, I say to you all, and I feel I 
can speak with as good authority as if it were 
possible to read it in so many words out of 
the Bible: take all the relaxation, summer- 
time and winter-time alike, that you can get, 
and when you relax, relax as though you 
meant it. Make a business of it. Do it con- 
scientiously. It is your solemn duty to your- 
self and family, to your partners and patrons, 
to all whom you touch in life and all who 
touch you. You will be the healthier, larger, 
stronger in mind, body, and soul if you do. 

Our imagination leads us in another direc- 
tion as we muse upon Peter's seaside sojourn. 
I say our imagination — I might better say 
our reasoning, for we are not speculating or 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 43 

guessing, we are drawing legitimate conclu- 
sions from well-founded premises. Taking 
Peter's temperament for our guide, we can 
readily infer another way in which he spent 
his time at Joppa. He had considerable senti- 
ment in his make-up; all people of his type 
have. With such a nature he could never 
have lodged in a town having the historic 
associations which Joppa had, by a sea like 
the Mediterranean, and not lost himself in 
reflections the most serious and sanctifying. 
The sea, though the symbol of restlessness, 
is to most people a source of the completest 
repose, not repose of mind so much as repose 
of spirit, a calming and silencing of the inner 
nature which gives feeling an opportunity to 
assert itself and permits thought to act with 
more than ordinary vigor. In these serene 
and quiet hours, therefore, Peter, we may 
well believe, went over his work in careful 
review, examining its defects, computing its 
results, and brooding over its lessons; he 
would naturally think of the future and form- 
ulate plans for his work; he would revert 
to the miracle he had just wrought and medi- 
tate upon its meaning to him as well as to 



44 Vision and Service 

those who witnessed it. From these and many 
other lines of reflection he must have imbibed 
wholesome encouragement and restraint, in- 
spiring confidence and cheer. 

This is exactly what every sojourn we take 
should do for us — give us time to think, to 
look over our personal accounts, to balance 
the ledgers of life, to review the past, to con- 
template the future, to make our plans and 
develop our purposes; in a word, it should 
give us an opportunity for the calmest and 
closest self-communion. 

But Peter communed with God as well as 
with himself. Every pious soul does at such 
times. What impressions the breaking bil- 
lows, the wide, trackless expanse of water, 
the hazy horizon — a sight entirely new to 
him — must have made upon Peter, and what 
thoughts they must have started! Face to 
face with scenes that spoke so eloquently of 
the Creator, a soul like Peter's could not have 
helped being lifted up into the immediate 
presence of God and given a spiritual endow- 
ment. 

This Is what we should seek for in every 
season of relaxation, to get near to nature's 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 45 

heart; and in doing this we shall get near to 
the heart of God. If the sea, or the moun- 
tains, or the rivers, or the forests do not 
open for us a straight, a luminous path to 
God, we have not approached them in the 
right spirit, and have failed to discover the 
opportunities they offer. Every visit to the 
country ought to expand, ennoble, endow our 
souls. 

There were other thoughts which doubtless 
occupied Peter's mind during his sojourn with 
Simon the tanner. Joppa was a historic 
place. It was here that Jonathan Macca- 
baeus met Ptolemy; here the Philistines once 
dwelt and exercised their cruel tyranny; here 
Solomon received the wood which Hiram 
shipped for the temple; here similar mate- 
rials were landed for Zerubbabel's use in re- 
building the temple, and it was from this port 
that Jonah set sail for his memorable voyage. 
Think you Peter forgot all this? Not for 
a moment; he could not have failed to revert 
to it with reverent and suggestive thought. 
And what subjects it opened up to him — 
subjects for study, for comparison and con- 
trast, for warning and encouragement: 



46 Vision and Service 

themes which must have been pre-eminently 
impressive, instructive, inspiring! 

May we not have something of the same 
experience wherever we go to take our sum- 
mer sojourn? Yes, if our hearts are open 
and receptive, if we are seekers after truth 
and are willing to receive it from the hands 
of any and every teacher prepared to im- 
part it. It may come from the present rather 
than the past associations of the place ; from 
its personnel instead of its history; from the 
simple lives, the honest toil, the homely faith 
of its humble folk, but come it will in some 
way and under some form, if we are dili- 
gently in search of it, and when it does come 
it will be to us an imperishable benediction. 

But we have sufficient in what is written 
of Peter's sojourn without going back of that 
for suggestion. Two things are recorded 
about his visit at Joppa which are as inter- 
esting as they are pertinent and suggestive. 

I. Peter had a vision here — in some re- 
spects the greatest vision of his life. You 
will readily recall it. He was up on the 
housetop praying. Gradually, as he looked 
off upon the sea, his prayer probably merged 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 47 

into meditation, and as the time passed he 
grew unconsciously hungry. When in this 
condition a great sheet knit at the four cor- 
ners and filled with four-footed beasts of the 
earth, and wild beasts and creeping things 
and fowls of the air, was let down to him 
with the command, " Rise, Peter, slay and 
eat." Thrice was this done, and thrice was 
his refusal to eat rebuked with the words, 
" What God hath cleansed, that call not thou 
common." 

The purpose of this vision was to teach 
him the equality of the Gentiles with the 
Jews, and his duty to preach the Gospel to 
them as well as to his countrymen. That 
vision transformed his convictions and com- 
pletely changed the bent of his career; it 
marked an epoch in the history of Christian- 
ity; it turned the tide of the Gospel into a 
new channel; it determined the universality 
of the Kingdom of God on the earth; it 
practically settled the status and destiny of 
the heathen world — and all this occurred dur- 
ing a seaside visit of a few days. 

There are visions for every Christian at 
the seashore, and at every place where our 



48 Vision and Service 

tramps and travels may happen to take us 
— visions of duty, of responsibility, of truth, 
of glory, of God; visions that reveal to us 
our Father's will; visions that outline the 
path of service; visions that make known to 
us the deeper things of faith. These are 
often so important that our future depends 
upon them, and to be blind to them would be 
a misfortune and a sin. 

But visions come to those only who are 
prepared to receive them. It was so with 
Peter. It is always so. Like him, we must 
be on the housetop praying if we would have 
revelations. Our eyes must be open to the 
deeper things about us — our souls in com- 
munion with God — or visions are impossible. 
If you go away and leave your Bible and your 
religion behind, demitting prayer, church at- 
tendance and the other functions of your 
soul-life, you need not expect to have God 
come to you in any new disclosures of Him- 
self; but if you go seeking fresh supplies of 
grace and prepared to receive greater light 
and strength, these will surely come, and as 
Peter left Joppa a stronger man in soul as 
well as in body, so you shall return to your 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 49 

homes to live a larger, higher spiritual life 
thereafter than ever before. 

II. The second event which occurred dur- 
ing this sojourn of Peter's was his experience 
with Cornelius. God did not allow him to 
be idle. He wanted to teach him that the 
opportunity and duty of doing good are al- 
ways and everywhere present. He seemed 
to want to show others through Peter that 
the time of relaxation is often the most likely 
and fruitful time for practical Christian work. 
Hence, instead of making the necessary rev- 
elation Himself to Cornelius, He bade him 
send down to Peter for instruction and direc- 
tion, thereby necessitating a journey from 
Caesarea to Joppa and at the same time ab- 
ruptly terminating Peter's visit with Simon 
the tanner at the seashore. Peter obeyed the 
summons and became unexpectedly the means 
of bringing into the Kingdom no less a per- 
sonage than the centurion of a Roman guard, 
a man who brought prestige incalculable to 
the cause of Jesus. 

Seaside or mountain sojourns are always 
periods of religious opportunity. God gives 
all of us some work to do at such times, and 



50 Vision and Service 

in not a few instances it proves the most 
important work of the year. Is this not 
frequently the case with all our incidental 
tasks? We make them under-rank those 
which belong to the regular routine and 
schedule of our lives, but the opposite order 
turns out at length to be the true one. This 
will invariably be the history of all the duties 
which Providence brings to us when on our 
summer outings. Do not say that your neg- 
lect to attend church or prayer-meeting, or 
to keep the Sabbath; will do no one any harm 
since you are among strangers. It will; its 
moral effect upon yourself will be everything 
but good, and it is sure to prove a stumbling- 
block to the country folk, who naturally look 
to their city visitors for a high Christian ex- 
ample. Do not excuse yourself from teaching 
a Sunday-school class because your stay is to 
be so short. Who would attempt to measure 
the results of one single half-hour Bible lesson 
prayerfully and earnestly taught? Regard 
not the brevity of a sojourn as an excuse for 
any religious neglect whatsoever; rather con- 
sider it an argument for exceptional activity. 
The smallest service, that costs you nothing 



A Seaside Vision and Its Sequel 51 

more than a passing effort, may prove of in- 
estimable value to a poorly-sustained rural 
church, and produce impressions which only 
God can compute. 

A city pastor was spending his vacation at 
a summer resort not far from New York. 
He was weary with the year's arduous work, 
and when invited to occupy the pulpit of the 
little church he felt it his duty to decline. 
Toward the close of the summer, however, 
he yielded, and preached a sermon of great 
eloquence and power. A little country lad 
then in his early 'teens sat in one of the pews 
that day and listened to the sermon with the 
closest attention. He had never heard any- 
thing quite like it before, and it thrilled him 
to his soul's depth. It set chords of his na- 
ture to vibrating which he did not know 
existed. It awakened impulses within him 
whose meaning he could not understand. 
The preacher was God's special messenger to 
him that day, who seemed to open up before 
him a vista down which his life was to pass. 
As the result of the impression made upon 
him by that sermon he afterward entered the 
ministry, and is to-day the pastor of one of 



52 Vision and Service 

our city churches, preaching to a large con- 
gregation and reaching thousands of souls. 
That one sermon, delivered during a summer 
sojourn, probably counted for more than all 
the sermons of a twelvemonth preached to 
the minister's own people at home. Oppor- 
tunities as great as this may come to us all, 
clergy and laity alike. Let us watch for 
them, and when they present themselves seize 
them and use them. 

What does Peter's seaside sojourn teach 
us, then? That such a season may be and 
ought to be to every Christian a time for 
genuine recreation, for serious reflection, for 
special revelations, and for more than usual 
diligence and consecration. 



THE OLD AND 7 HE NEW 



"That ye put off the old man . . . 
and that ye put on the new man." 

Ephesians iv. 22, 24 



THE OLD AND THE NEW 

THE apostle here speaks of human 
nature generically as " the man." 
When that human nature is domi- 
nated by sin, he describes it as the " old 
man "; when it is under the control of right- 
eousness he characterizes it as the " new man." 
Was ever a distinction more discriminating 
and exact than that? It is a fact behind 
which stands the proof of the ages, that sin 
is intrinsically and characteristically old and 
that righteousness is inherently and pro- 
verbially new. 

And that does not mean simply that sin 
ages the person who indulges in it, while 
righteousness renews one's youth and keeps 
one ever buoyant and vigorous. That is 

55 



$6 Vision and Service 

true, of course, invariably, universally true, as 
we have all had occasion to observe, if not to 
experience. Is there anything that will sap 
one's vitality and make him prematurely old 
as will dissipation, putting the bend into his 
shoulders, the furrows into his face and the 
disease germs into his blood? I never visit 
a rescue home but that is my chief impression. 
Some years ago the adjutant general of the 
Salvation Army took me the rounds of their 
lodging-houses in London, patronized for the 
most part by ex-convicts and other criminal 
classes, and when I came away I felt that I 
had visited a great infirmary. 

Equally striking is the converse of this. 
There is nothing so youth-giving as right 
living. The youngest spirits I know are men 
and women of three-score years and ten or 
more, who have always treated their bodies 
as the temples of the Holy Ghost, and across 
whose lives there is traceable no track of a 
foul past. Dr. Cuyler, in that remarkable 
book, The Recollections of a Long Life, 
has said that the secret of his unusual vitality 
at eighty — he was then eighty and is now 
eighty-five — was his clean and correct life. 



The Old and The New 57 

That was Gladstone's secret. It is the secret of 
our Grand Old Man of America, the present 
chaplain of the United States Senate. A few 
weeks ago, on my way back from the Adiron- 
dack Mountains, where I spend my summers, 
I stopped off in Canada to see a great-uncle 
who, on the thirteenth of August, celebrated 
his ninety-fifth birthday, and on that very day 
led up the aisle of the church on his arm his 
youngest daughter to give her away in matri- 
mony. As I sat beside that dear old man, a 
modern saint, and keener in his intellect than 
I can ever be, I felt the renewing power 
of goodness — the youthfulness of goodness. 
There is nothing so rejuvenating, my friends, 
as is righteousness. 

But that is not the point here. It is not 
that sin is aging and holiness youth-giving. 
It is that sin essentially, in and of itself, is 
old, and that righteousness essentially, in and 
of itself, is new; that sin is senile, effete, of 
wasting vitality and lessening resources, and, 
on the other hand, the pure, the good, the 
true, the holy, bear the marks and have the 
nature of perennial youthfulness. 

Now, you have not always been accus- 



5 8 Vision and Service 

tomed to think that. Your impressions have 
been quite the contrary. You have said, 
" Oh, righteousness is so slow; it is so tardy 
and unaggressive; always lagging behind in 
the march of civilization; always hesitant to 
force a battle, and, when the battle is fought, 
to claim the victory, while sin is so alert and 
enterprising, ever keen of scent and quick of 
action." In this you have been right and you 
have also been wrong. The trouble is you 
have confused subject and predicate; you 
have made the mistake of ascribing the 
qualities of the agency to the agent himself. 
Righteousness as we know it is slow and tardy, 
unassertive and unaggressive; it is hesitant 
about manifesting itself or claiming its own 
rights, but what kind of righteousness are 
we dealing with? Human righteousness, 
and therefore righteousness modified and 
adulterated. But take essential, original 
righteousness, the righteousness of God, if 
you please. How swift it is! How posi- 
tive ! How aggressive ! How irresistibly 
enterprising, so that you and I have always 
to be commanding ourselves, as did Julia 
Ward Howe, 



The Old and The New 59 

"Be swift, my soul, to answer Him, be jubilant, my feet, 
Our God is marching on." 

And what do we find at the opposite pole? 
Satan is indeed alert and active. He never 
tires. He abounds in energy, but look at 
the instrument which he wields. Do you not 
see the rust on its scabbard? and will you 
mark the blade, how dull it is, how dented, 
how bent? Why, the fact is, sin has nothing 
new to offer us. Long ago it used up its pos- 
sibilities. It has no further ingenuity or 
inventiveness. So far as its method is con- 
cerned, it is passe, Alexander the Great, weep- 
ing because there were no more worlds to 
conquer, has a counterpart in the devotee, 
worn out and blase, who can find no new 
depths of dissipation to fathom, and no fur- 
ther rounds of pleasure to sally forth upon. 
He has used up the resources of sin and is 
ennuied and satiated. 

Take a broad, long look into history and 
see if this be not true. Let us begin with 
the social evil. We think very little about it 
ordinarily, and say less, unless it is obtruded 
upon us by some such tragedy as the murder 
now occupying so much space in our news- 



60 Vision and Service 

papers, and then we are inclined to remark, 
" This is one of the penalties of modern life." 
But we are wrong. The social evil in none of 
its phases is new. Will you step back with 
me, a good long step, from New York or 
Chicago to Pompeii? What tourist has not 
been amazed as he has visited the ruins of 
that great city? Signs still decipherable on 
some of the houses, obscene carvings in out-of- 
the-way corners, and the suggestive appoint- 
ments of some of the rooms all show that 
things were far worse in Pompeii than they 
are to-day. Then let us take another step back 
from Pompeii to Babylon. There you find 
the same things, only they are worse. And 
then one immense stride back to the border 
of civilization, to Sodom. Behold! every- 
thing that flourishes in our modern cities was 
known and practiced there. Why, there 
hasn't been anything new about the social evil 
for five thousand years. 

Trace the history of what we call commer- 
cial oppression, and you will come out at the 
same conclusion. We protest against the 
cruelty of child labor and we inveigh against 
the sweat-shop, and why should we not ? We 



The Old and The New 61 

declare that the great corporations of this 
country are heartless and terribly selfish, and 
they are. But don't make the mistake of de- 
claring these things modern, for you will only 
reveal your own ignorance if you do. Solon, 
for instance, lived twenty-five hundred years 
ago, and now holds an enviable position in 
history as a great lawgiver; but a distinguished 
author in a book recently published makes this 
statement concerning him : " Solon's system 
was built upon the false principle that wealth 
was the basis of respect and the guarantee of 
social standing." Solon, mind you ! And this 
same author gives it as his professional opin- 
ion that in the building of all the great struc- 
tures of Pericles' time there was everywhere 
in Greece an utter disregard of human life. 
Then we are simply attacking an ancient evil 
when we talk in these days about the sweat- 
shops, the corporations and the cruelties of 
child labor. 

But come down with me to the degrada- 
tion of so-called modern high life. I do not 
know why they call it " high." It is about 
the lowest and basest thing that this world 
knows. I suppose that all that Henry Wat- 



62 Vision and Service 

terson said about Newport society is true, and 
more than true. The gambling, the drunken- 
ness, the gluttony and general bestiality prac- 
ticed there are enough to make one shudder 
with the premonitions of the coming judg- 
ment. No doubt things are just about as bad 
as they can be, but, mark you, they are not 
any worse than they have been. Professor 
Mahaffy, in his book on Greek Civilization, 
has this to say of the period of the New 
Comedy: "The life of the youth of Athens 
was spent in drunkenness, in squandering 
money and the worst kind of dissipation. A 
similar condition existed at Corinth. These 
people were idle, for the most part rich, 
moving in good society, spending their earlier 
years in debauchery and their later years in 
sentimental regrets and reflections. They 
had no serious objects in life, and regarded 
the complications of a love affair as more 
interesting than the rise and fall of a nation's 
liberty." Doesn't that sound for all the world 
like a description of Newport society? 

But, you say, there is one evil that is mod- 
ern, and it remained for Theodore Roosevelt 
and his kind to bring it to the light. Muck- 



The Old and The New 63 

raking is an evil peculiar to our age. Mod- 
ern? Yes, if you call the days of Abraham 
Lincoln modern. Some of us recall the names 
of opprobrium they used to give the savior 
of our country fifty years ago, and how we 
are resenting them now, men and women of 
the South as well as of the North. Modern? 
Yes, if the days of Washington are modern. 
No patriot can read some of the early chap- 
ters of our American history without ebul- 
litions of anger and resentment. Modern? 
Yes, if the days of Demosthenes and ^Eschines 
are modern. One historian tells us that at- 
tacks upon public men back in those days were 
scarcely less than scurrilous. No, muck-rak- 
ing is not new, neither is political plunder nor 
commercial graft. All these are as old as 
our humanity. Sin has nothing new to bring 
to the footlights. It is the same old weary- 
ing and monotonous round, the same old re- 
peated repertoire, the same old dingy stage 
settings. Sin is senile and effete. I never 
saw this better illustrated than in the remark 
of a young man whom I met a few years ago 
in Egypt. He had been seeing the sights of 
old Cairo, and I could detect something about 



64 Vision and Service 

his eyes and sad face that told of dissipation. 
" How do you like Cairo? " I asked him, 
and he answered, " I am disappointed in it. 
It is nothing but New York and Chicago over 
again." 

Turn to the other side and see if history 
does not as fully bear out our author when 
he says that righteousness is essentially and 
perennially new. Begin with sickness. Sick- 
ness is as old as the human body, but would 
you say that the means and methods of re- 
lieving sickness are old? No, there is always 
something inspiringly new about these, dis- 
covery after discovery, invention after inven- 
tion, until the resources of materia medica 
and the skill of modern surgery are among 
the marvels of the world. If a young man 
should come to me and ask how he might 
become a great inventor, I would say: " Just 
give yourself to the work of relieving human 
suffering, and every day will bring you new 
revelations." 

Take poverty next. Poverty may not be 
as old as the hills, but it is as old as the 
time when there were men to look and live 
upon the hills. Behold the contrast between 



The Old and The New 6$ 

poverty and the agencies for relieving it! 
Do not you older people remember a dozen, 
yes, twenty-five, charitable organizations that 
have been organized in your time — the 
Visiting Nurses' Association, the Children's 
Aid Society, the Bureau of Charity, the 
Fresh Air Fund, the Needle Work Guild, 
and what not? And what is true of char- 
ity work is also true of its workers. 

Charles Loring Brace, the founder of the 
Children's Aid Society, testified at the close 
of his first year's service in the slums of New 
York City that life had never been to him 
so rich, so glad a thing as it was then. And 
have you happened to hear of that inci- 
dent in Matthew Arnold's life when, meeting 
a Christian worker in the slums of White- 
chapel, he exclaimed, " What a lonely and 
sorrowful life, good man, yours must be ! " 
The man replied with a smile on his face 
such as Matthew Arnold's had never worn: 
" Lonely and sorrowful? On the contrary 
I have been particularly light-hearted since 
coming to dwell and labor among these peo- 
ple." What is the declaration of humanity's 
greatest Friend? " Behold, I make all things 



66 Vision and Service 

new! " What is the final description of the 
city from which sin is to be forever banished 
and where righteousness shall be wholly 
dominant? " And I saw a new heaven and 
a new earth." 

But why do I go outside for my evidence ? 
Let me come, men and women, into your 
own lives and recall to you some of the 
deeper experiences of your religion. Do you 
remember the night of your conversion, 
how the stars looked to you when you 
went again into the outside world? I dis- 
covered a dozen new constellations on my 
way home that night, and the whole world 
about me seemed infinitely more beautiful 
than before. Can you not recall your first 
communion, Christian? Did bread and wine 
ever taste half as sweet as at the sacred board 
that day? Surely, that was an instance where 
realization far exceeded anticipation. Per- 
haps I speak to some fellow-minister. My 
brother, shall we ever be able to describe 
our feelings that night of our ordination when 
the holy hands went down upon our heads? 
There was a magnetic thrill from the contact 



The Old and The New 67 

of body with body, but there was also a spirit- 
ual thrill that leaped all through my being. 

Revert to some other holy times in your life. 
That early morning, Christian mother, when 
you turned your face on your pillow and, be- 
holding for the first time the little life you 
had brought into the world, felt the rush of 
motherhood coursing through your soul. 
That day, man, when the doctor said you 
could go in, and as your eyes fell upon that 
sweet, angelic form, you felt for the first 
time the divine emotion of fatherhood. Oh, 
what revelations of purity opened to you that 
day — what hitherto hidden resources of 
pleasure ! What new burdens of responsibil- 
ity dropped upon your conscience ! What 
heights and depths and breadths and lengths 
of love stretched before you which, up to that 
moment, you never had known existed ! This 
is why the path of the just shineth brighter 
and brighter unto the perfect day. Every day 
is a new creation, every successive providence 
a fresh revelation of God's love, every dis- 
covered beauty of nature a farther disclosure 
of " the glory that excelled!.'' 



68 Vision and Service 

" The wildest winter storm is full of beauty, 
The midnight's lightning flash but shows the path of 

duty, 
Each living creature tells some new and joyous story, 
The very trees and stones all catch a ray of glory, 
If peace be in the heart." 

I speak to many young men and young 
women — a high privilege, yes, and a high 
responsibility! Every high-minded young 
person has three great ambitions : First, to 
be vigorous and strong and keep abreast of 
the times. Another ambition that impels you 
all is to get as much happiness out of life 
as possible. And your third ambition is to 
make your life worth while, achieving and 
successful. Well, link yourselves with sin, my 
young friends, and none of these ambitions 
will be realized. Life will be daily a duller, 
narrower, sadder, harder thing. Its possi- 
bilities and resources will soon be exhausted, 
and your usefulness and vigor gone. But 
ally yourselves with the pure, the good, the 
true, the godly, and every high ambition you 
know shall have an early and ever-expanding 
fulfillment. Life will prove itself a steadily 
deepening, gladdening experience, and your 



The Old and The New 69 

chosen motto be like unto that which Phillips 
Brooks borrowed from Browning: 

"Oh, the wild joy of living! 
How good is man's life, the mere living! 
How fit to employ all the mind and the heart and the 
senses forever in joy ! " 

Men and women, younger and older, Satan 
comes to us saying, " Grow old with me, and 
you will soon be old, decrepit, cheerless, 
effete." But Jesus also draws near, and this 
is His invitation : 

" Grow old along with Me ! 
The best is yet to be, 

The last of life for which the first was made. 
Our times are in His hand, 
Who said, 'A whole I planned, 

Youth shows but half; trust God, see all, nor be 
afraid.' " 

Shall not our answer to Him be? — 

" My times be in Thy hand ! 
Perfect the cup is planned. 
Let age approve of youth and death complete the same." 



THE BLIND MAN'S 
VISION 



"Jesus heard that they had cast him 
out; and when He had found him, He 
said unto him, Dost thou believe on the 
Son of God? 

"He answered and said. Who is 
He, Lord, that I might believe on Him? 

"And Jesus said unto him, Thou 
hast both seen Him, and it is He that 
talketh with thee. 

"And he said, Lord, I believe. 
And he worshipped Him." 

John ix. 35-38 



THE BLIND MAN'S VISION 

THIS man's religious experience, it 
would seem, was both normal and 
typical. It was a distinct and pro- 
gressive spiritual evolution, marking the sev- 
eral stages through which all men must pass, 
if they would come into a clear, intelligent 
and dynamic faith. 

The evolution ran its course, it is true, in 
a single day — in less than a day, for that 
matter — one stage following another in quick 
succession; but that fact in no way militated 
against its genuineness. Grapes grown in a 
hot-house ripen in much less time than grapes 
grown in the open, but precisely the same 
processes are passed through, the only differ- 
ence being in their length or duration. Will 
73 



74 Vision and Service 

you be good enough to trace with me the 
successive stages in the blind man's spiritual 
development? 

I. It began with the physical for its basis. 
How interesting to note that Jesus volun- 
teered His aid to this unfortunate man. Does 
He not always make the first advances? " Ye 
have not chosen Me, but I have chosen you, 
and ordained you that ye should go and bring 
forth fruit." " I have come that ye might 
have life and that ye might have it more 
abundantly." " Ye will not come unto Me 
that ye might have life." 

Jesus, in passing by, noticed the blind man, 
and, taking pity upon him, He anointed his 
eyes with improvised clay and sent him to the 
pool of Siloam to bathe, without identifying 
Himself to the man or laying any intellectual 
or spiritual requirement upon him. All that 
He bade him do was to betake himself as 
quickly as possible to the waters, and the nar- 
rative runs that " the man came seeing." It 
is only a straightforward, matter-of-fact rec- 
ord, but who can measure its full significance? 
He left the spring in the possession of a 
new faculty. Born blind, he had spent his 



The Blind Man's Vision 75 

life up to this time in total darkness. Now 
he could see — and oh! what beauty, what 
glory opened up before him? He stepped 
at once into a new world. How wonderful 
the verdure of the earth, how yet more won- 
derful the blue of the firmament and the gold 
of the sunlight! In the words of Long- 
fellow, 

"A holy light illumined all the place." 

People had told him in the days of his 
blindness what the world looked like, and he 
had often tried to imagine its appearance. He 
caught some impressions of it, too, through 
the senses of hearing and touch and smell; 
but oh ! it was infinitely more glorious than 
anything he had dreamed of. It dazzled 
him; it overpowered and overjoyed him. 

Beloved, if the gift of one new physical 
faculty will add so much to a man's happi- 
ness and usefulness in this world, what will 
not the increase of all our faculties, the ex- 
pansion of all our powers, bring to us when 
we awake in the other world in the likeness 
of the Son of God? Surely, Paul was not 
indulging in exaggeration when, freely trans- 



76 Vision and Service 

lating Isaiah, he exclaimed: " Eye hath not 
seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into 
the heart of man, the things which God hath 
prepared for them that love him." Nor are 
the well-known lines of Hood in the least 
extravagant : 

"Take all the pleasures of all the spheres 
And multiply these by endless years, 
One moment of heaven is worth them all." 

The first service which Jesus rendered this 
man, then, was purely physical, but that boon, 
physical though it was, conferred upon him 
an incalculable blessing. 

II. The second stage in the evolutionary 
process was a moral one. Added usefulness 
instantly brought new and solemn responsi- 
bility. The gift of this new faculty, so benefi- 
cent in its character, had endowed him with 
an increased capacity for pain. It had intro- 
duced him into a new joy, an immeasurable 
joy, but at the same time it had introduced 
him into a deep and poignant distress. 

In what way? Revert to the narrative. 
No sooner had he left the pool with his eyes 
opened, leaping and singing for joy, than his 



The Blind Man's Vision 77 

neighbors began to ply him with questions. 
"How were thine eyes opened?" " Who 
did it?" "What sayest thou of Him?" 
Thus he found himself face to face with the 
necessity of accounting for what had hap- 
pened to him. A tremendous problem was 
fastening its grip upon him. You can fairly 
see his contortions as he struggles to free 
himself from its toils. He is set to thinking; 
thought leads to wonder, and wonder to rea- 
soning, and reasoning brings moral confusion. 
He cannot think it out for himself. 

He was indeed in a new world — new to 
his mind as well as to his eyes, and no stranger 
to his senses than to his soul. The one was 
as hard to comprehend as the other. His 
neighbors taunted and tantalized him with his 
ignorance, and when out of simple justice he 
began to speak a good word for his bene- 
factor, they reviled him and finally cast him 
out. He had only stepped from one diffi- 
culty into another, and the moral predicament 
into which he had come was even worse than 
the physical disability from which he had 
emerged. He had been given physical sight, 
but that served only to disclose to him his 



78 Vision and Service 

inner darkness. His soul had been thrown 
into a state of ethical confusion. 

Was he tempted to think it would have 
been better had he stayed blind? Perhaps so. 
That would have been natural. But would 
such a conclusion have been warrantable ? Is 
it psychologically sound, to say nothing of its 
spiritual aspect, for anyone to declare it were 
better that the heathen were left to their 
native darkness than to be brought into the 
light and into the possibility of sinning 
against the light? When this man began to 
struggle with the problem pressed in upon 
him, he started at once to climb to a higher 
plane of life. His ethical sense was awak- 
ened, and for the first time actually asserted 
itself. His moral horizon began to expand. 
He found his manhood. Life was no longer 
a mere existence, such as it had been to him 
hitherto in his effort through begging to keep 
soul and body together. Life was a far- 
reaching, ethical reality, involving the great- 
est issues and fraught with tremendous re- 
sponsibility. 

III. It was when the man was at this junc- 
ture that Jesus sought him out again. He 



The Blind Man's Vision 79 

had left him purposely, and had been waiting 
only for this situation to develop. Finding 
him, Jesus put to him the question instantly, 
abruptly, " Dost thou believe on the Son of 
God? " You have expressed your judgment 
about Me, but mere ideas are not enough- — 
they have never saved anyone. What you 
need is conviction. It is convictions, not sen- 
timents, that will deliver a man in your estate. 
I do not ask what you think of Me, or how 
you feel toward Me — of course, you are think- 
ing good thoughts of Me and feeling emo- 
tions of gratitude toward Me. Dost thou 
believe on the Son of God? 

The man, dazed even more than when the 
restoration of his eyesight came to him, at 
once replied: "Who is he, Lord, that I 
might believe on him? " " I want to believe 
and I must believe something; I must be Tight- 
ened, or I had rather go back to my former 
blindness. Help me, Rabbi, I am in great 
distress. My soul is in tumult and will not 
be stilled." And Jesus, seizing the situation, 
as only Jesus knew how to do, knowing the 
man was now ready for the revelation, an- 
swered, " Thou hast both seen Him, and it 



80 Vision and Service 

is He that talketh with thee." And a light 
flooding the man's soul ten times more lumi- 
nous and effulgent than broke into his eyes 
when physical sight came, and finding hope 
and joy and deliverance in its ministry, he 
exclaimed, " Lord, I believe. And he wor- 
shipped Him." 

This was the blind man's spiritual history, 
and it marks, as I have already intimated, the 
evolutionary stages of a normal spiritual expe- 
rience. God has given you some physical 
boon, and it has made life many times more 
enjoyable to you. You have come into the 
possession of wealth, and wealth has unlocked 
for you new worlds of pleasure and possi- 
bility. You wonder how you ever got on 
without money. A little life has been sent 
into your home, and you have said a thou- 
sand times since that life was not living before 
baby came. You were fortunate enough to 
get a college education, and how it has 
widened for you the horizon of life! You 
have been cured of some disease that was 
hanging over you; the surgeon's knife, per- 
haps, removed some weakness completely and 
gave you a freedom from pain, a liberty of 



The Blind Man's Vision 81 

action you had never known before. Or you 
are gifted with health and vigor above your 
fellows. Life has for you peculiar zest and 
enjoyment. 

So far the Great Giver's favor has been a 
blessing, but with the blessing has come new 
responsibility, larger problems, higher obli- 
gations. The outside world, learning of your 
wealth and acting upon the suggestion that 
your wealth was a trust, has begun to bom- 
bard you with appeals. You are less inde- 
pendent and less at ease than when you were 
poorer. Baby came " trailing clouds of glory," 
but what care, what anxious and solicitous 
responsibility he also brought with him ! How 
can I train this life aright? How can I keep 
the little spark from being extinguished? you 
are asking, and you never get a full night's 
sleep now, and never is there a day but your 
nerves are taut with anxiety and concern. 
That college education has brought to you 
ambitions and obligations you did not foresee 
when you entered college; and your restora- 
tion to perfect health, or your native vigor, 
has entailed special obligations, home cares, 
religious demands, which now press their way 



82 Vision and Service 

m upon you. If afflictions are blessings in 
disguise, so are blessings afflictions in dis- 
guise. 

Don't you recognize God's purpose? He 
has been dealing intelligently, wisely, logi- 
cally, with you. You had your eye upon the 
physical, and were inclined to be satisfied with 
and absorbed in that, but His eye all the while 
has been upon something higher and farther 
on, to which the physical was but antecedent 
and preparatory. 

And having disturbed rather than quieted 
you, having brought you to exchange your 
one simple problem for a hundred complex 
ones, having confronted you with duties, re- 
sponsibilities, exactions, and even temptations 
you were a stranger to before, in other words, 
having led you by way of the material into 
the seriously moral, and awakened within you 
a sense of the reality, the complexity, the 
responsibility, the eternity of human life, He 
then presents Himself before you, and asks 
you to find in Him your deliverer from your 
moral bondage, even as He had proved Him- 
self your deliverer from your physical dis- 
ability. 



The Blind Man's Vision 83 

Your only hope, make sure of it, lies not 
in having ideas of Christ, or sentiments about 
Christ, but in convictions concerning Him. 
" Believe in Me," is His word. Make Me 
your Teacher, your Master, your Redeemer; 
relate yourself to Me vitally, ethically, spirit- 
ually; let Me become your guide and gov- 
ernor and goal; dedicate that wealth to Me 
and let Me share the responsibility of dis- 
tributing it; regard that child as Mine and 
let his spiritual training be your chief concern ; 
consecrate that education, that restored health, 
or that native vigor to Me ; bring your ques- 
tions to Me to answer; your duties to Me to 
help you fulfill them; your cares to Me that 
I may share them; your burdens to Me that 
I, too, may put My shoulder under them, and 
I will lead you out into a gladder, grander 
sphere of life. Your mind will have a new 
vision as well as your physical being, and 
your soul as well as your mind. Your horizon 
will widen and widen until it sweeps the circle 
of eternity. Oh, Jesus is our Saviour for this 
life as well as for the life to come ! 

Dost thou personally, actually, fully be- 
lieve on the Son of God? 



84 Vision and Service 

" I have a life in Christ to live, 

But ere I live it must I wait 
Till learning can clear answer give 

To this or that book's date? 
I have a life in Christ to live, 

I have a death in Christ to die; 
But must I wait till science give 

All doubts their full reply? 

" Nay, rather, while the sea of doubt 
Is raging wildly round about 
Questionings of life or death or sin, 
Let me but creep within 
Thy fold, O Christ, and at Thy feet 
Take the lowest seat, 
And hear Thine awful voice repeat 
In gentlest accents, heavenly sweet, 
' Come unto Me and rest ; 
Believe Me and be blest.'" 



THE CHURCH IN 
NEW LIGHT 



"For we are made a spectacle unto 
the world, and to angels, and to men." 

I Corinthians iv. Q 



THE CHURCH IN A NEW 
LIGHT 

7" TT 7* HY the translators should have 
l/j/ used the word spectacle here it 

* * is not easy to say. Paul's word 

did not need translating, and in their attempt 
to render it they have only confused his 
meaning, and quite hidden his metaphor from 
sight. The original word was theater, and 
you will find that given in the margin of your 
Bibles for an alternate rendering. Read 
the verse with this substituted, and see how 
striking the idea to which the Apostle gives 
expression : For we are made a theater unto 
the world, and to angels, and to men. 

We often hear of turning a theater tem- 
porarily into a church, but here St. Paul turns 
the church permanently into a theater. It is 
87 



88 Vision and Service 

the same idea which the author of the He- 
brews makes use of in the opening of the 
twelfth chapter: Seeing we are compassed 
about by so great a cloud of witnesses, with 
this difference, that there the Christian is 
thought of as running a race in the presence 
of an audience gathered in a stadium, while 
here he is represented as producing a play 
in the sight of a concourse of people assem- 
bled in a theater. 

It is this kind of a theater I would like to 
say a word about. Not the one you go to, 
or wonder whether you should go to, in order 
to see others act, but the theater to which 
others come to see you act. You may stay 
away from the world's playhouse on princi- 
ple, as I do, but this is a playhouse you can- 
not deny others the right to attend. 

I. Who are the actors in this theater? 
One would suppose upon the first reading of 
this Scripture, or the tenth reading, if super- 
ficial, that Paul was referring here solely to 
the apostles; but a close reading convinces 
us that he is not thinking of any particular 
class, but of all the disciples of Christ without 
distinction. In any case, are we not all apos- 



The Church in a New Light 89 

ties? This is the order: Called out of the 
world; separated from the world; kept in the 
midst of the world; sent back into the world; 
saved with the world. Everyone who has 
named the name of Jesus and is allied with 
the Church and Kingdom is an actor. Out 
in the world it is an unusual thing for a per- 
son to go on the stage; when anyone does it 
always raises a question and provokes criti- 
cism ; but there is no choice with the Christian ; 
whether he will or not, he is assigned to the 
stage. We are all born actors when we come 
into the Kingdom. 

Some figure more prominently before the 
audience than others, but there are no minor 
parts. It is given everybody to impersonate 
one and the same character, to represent, yes, 
to reproduce, the life and character of Jesus 
of Nazareth. Christ impersonates the Father, 
and we impersonate Christ — how it makes 
one tremble to think of it ! There are people 
in the world — how startling the truth when 
thus boldly stated— who will never know 
more of Christ than we exhibit to them. " I 
must seek the salvation of my classmates as 
if there were not another one to do it," young 



90 Vision and Service 

Taylor, of Princeton, that remarkable soul- 
winner, was in the habit of saying to himself. 
How can we keep from spurring ourselves 
on in the selfsame way when we realize our 
responsibilities as the impersonators of Jesus 
Christ? Well might Jonathan Edwards' 
sixty-third resolution be ours: " On the sup- 
position that there never was to be but one 
individual in the world at any one time who 
was properly a complete Christian, in all 
respects of a right stamp, having Christianity 
always shining in its true luster, and appear- 
ing excellent and lovely, from whatever part 
and under whatever character viewed: Re- 
solved, to act just as I would do if I strove 
with all my might to be that one who should 
live in my time." 

Beloved, is the presentation of Jesus Christ 
which the Church is making to-day weaker 
or stronger because of your acting? Pope's 
famous line we are justified in interpolating: 
" Act well thy part, there all the honor [of 
Jesus Christ] lies." 

II. And what is it we are playing? We 
have already seen that it is a character sketch 
— the impersonation of Christ before the age 



The Church in a New Light 91 

and community of which we are a part. It 
is also a great moral play, in which we are 
showing to the world the effect of our relig- 
ion upon human character and conduct — what 
sort of men and women it produces, what 
power it has to sweeten our spirits and make 
pure and noble our lives. Every performance 
gives an impression for or against Chris- 
tianity. 

And it is a tragedy, depicting to the great 
audience of onlookers how the Gospel enables 
us to meet sorrow and disaster and death, and 
be brave and steadfast and calm in the midst 
of the adverse things of life. Not long ago 
a family, recently bereaved under the heaviest 
stroke of God's corrective rod, sat in their ac- 
customed pew at service. Remembering how 
many Christians abandon the Church when 
sorrow comes to them, and turn away from 
their religion as if it were then the last thing 
to put dependence upon, I wondered at their 
presence in church. Still more did I wonder 
when they arose and sang the congregational 
hymns. Turning to the minister who sat 
with me in the pulpit, a relative of theirs, I 
expressed surprise, and he answered: " They 



92 Vision and Service 

are Christian people, and their only comfort 
is the Church and the Gospel. Why should 
they stay away from service, or, coming, re- 
fuse to join in the worship? " Who will say 
that the minister was wrong? That family 
were doing more for Christianity by their 
fortitude and their simple, practical faith than 
a hundred sermons could have done. Thou- 
sands never come to church to hear the Gos- 
pel preached that daily see it visibly lived. 
Oh! the responsibility of it! God press it 
down more and more heavily upon our 
hearts! 

III. Now, as to the audience. Who are 
the spectators? Different types, of course, 
as in every body of auditors. 

( i ) The world is named first. Not the 
world of people, but of nature — the cosmos. 
Elsewhere Paul speaks of the whole creation 
waiting for the manifestation of the sons of 
God. Here he represents the whole creation 
as watching that manifestation. And is that 
not what the universe is doing — observing the 
effect of redeeming love upon the sons of 
men? All the rest of creation has been obedi- 
ent, man alone having rebelled against his 



The Church in a New Light 93 

Creator. That rebellion God has mercifully 
overlooked, and at great sacrifice sought to 
overturn, sending His own Son to lead us 
back into submission and rest. And the 
Creation, wondering at such mercy, is watch- 
ing to see the result. It expects man, from 
sheer gratitude, to turn back to God, and live 
thenceforth in dutiful sonship. How inter- 
esting the spectacle ! No theater play could 
be more engaging than this whole problem is 
to the cosmos. 

(2) The heavenly intelligences come next 
into sight as the apostle looks forth from the 
stage into the great audience. He does not 
speak of God as a spectator, but, without 
question, the Creator is the most interested 
auditor of all. When Beethoven's sympho- 
nies were produced, their composer, we are 
told, was always the person most eager and 
alert in all the opera house. Every brilliant 
play elated him and every mistake pained him 
as no one else in the audience. God's interest 
in the drama of Christianity as it is being 
rendered by us is that of the composer. And 
that interest is enhanced by the fact that He 
is the fond father of those who are taking 



94 Vision and Service 

part. You recall with what concern and 
pleasure you sat through the school exhibition 
when your boy used to declaim. That is 
God's feeling, only many times multiplied, as 
He watches your rendering of Christianity. 
How seldom is He pleased! How often is 
He pained and humiliated ! We have a great 
deal to say about the joy of heaven. Would 
that we thought more of its pain — the sor- 
row which our blunders and misrepresenta- 
tions bring to the anxious heart of our observ- 
ing Father. 

Were we not prepared to have the angels 
pointed out to us in this tier of the audito- 
rium? Peter tells us they desire to look into 
these things, and here Paul says they are look- 
ing upon them — studying the history of re- 
demption, seeing how those for whom God 
has shown a greater love than for the rest 
of His creatures, receive it and what response 
they are making to it. 

(3) And last of all, he calls our attention 
to the great company of men who make up 
the audience. They are the most important 
part of the whole company, for it is not so 
much a question as to whether they are duly 



The Church in a New Light 95 

impressed and pleased, as in the case of the 
rest of the audience, but their souls' salvation 
is involved. They are being won to Christ 
or turned against Him by what they see and 
hear in this theater. 

There, right in front, sit the scoffers with 
their magnifying glasses watching our every 
movement, and, oh, how they jeer when we 
make a break or take a misstep upon the 
stage ! There are the haters of God, the infi- 
dels, the skeptics, the blasphemers, only wait- 
ing for a chance to hurl some new jibe at 
religion. There sit, too, great rows of in- 
quirers, honest seekers after truth, who would 
know whether these things are so or not. 
Whole sections are filled with little children 
and young men and women, getting their 
first impressions of the Christian life, and 
forming judgment as to whether it is worth 
while. Said a little child mysteriously of 
Robert Falconer, judging from his life: "I 
know who that is; I think he must be Jesus 
Christ." Said a poor tenement woman, call- 
ing her tiny daughter to the window to see 
a missionary who for years had been at work 
in the slums, " There goes a Christ." Said 



g6 Vision and Service 

Dr. Trumbull's little girl after Henry F. 
Durand, who had been on a visit in the home, 
had gone, " Papa, the very name of Jesus 
sounds sweeter when that man speaks it." 
What are they saying about you, fellow- 
actor? Think more of your audience ! Think 
more of those magnifying glasses that are 
looking your way! Think more and oftener 
of the souls whom you are all the while 
pointing to or away from Jesus Christ. 

" 'Tis not for us to trifle — 
Life is brief and sin is here. 
Our age is but the falling of a leaf, 

The dropping of a tear. 
Not many lives, but only one, have we. 
How sacred should that one life be ! 
We have no time to sport away the hours. 
All must be earnest in a world like ours." 



THE SECRET OF JESUS' 
LIFE 



"For I came down from heaven, not 
to do Mine own will, but the will of Him 
that sent Me/' 

John vi. 38 
"My meat is to do the will of Him 
that sent Me." 

John iv. 34 
"Because I seek not Mine own will, 
but the will of the Father which hath 
sent Me" 

John v. JO 
"I do always those things that please 
Him" 

John viii. 2Q 



THE SECRET OF JESUS' 
LIFE 

THERE are four Scriptures, all the 
sayings of Jesus and all found in 
the Fourth Gospel, which define 
for me the basic secret of Jesus' life. John 
vi. 38 — " For I came down from heaven, not 
to do Mine own will, but the will of Him that 
sent me " — doing the will of God the purpose 
of Christ's life. John iv. 34 — " My meat is 
to do the will of Him that sent Me " — doing 
the will of God the pleasure of Christ's life, 
its very sustenance and inspiration, its enjoy- 
ment and satisfaction. John v. 30 — " Be- 
cause I seek not Mine own will, but the will 
of the Father which hath sent Me " — doing 
the will of God the pursuit or principle of 
Christ's life. John viii. 29 — " I do always 
99 



LOFC. 



ioo Vision and Service 

those things that please Him " — doing the 
will of God the practice of Christ's life. 

This was our Lord's unique and unqualified 
claim. Was it substantiated? Did He give 
full proof to the world that doing God's will 
was the purpose, the pleasure, the pursuit and 
the practice of His life? That He always 
diligently sought to know and earnestly set 
Himself to do God's will is beyond dispute. 
A study of His prayer-life fully attests this. 
" Strong Son of God " though He was, aware 
of His appointed mission in the world as He 
must have been, yet was He constantly asking 
His Father what direction His way should 
take or what turns in the way already taken 
He should make. " What wilt Thou have 
Me to do? " was His perpetual inquiry. 

If ever anyone had less need than another 
to pray, was it not Jesus Christ? And yet 
we find that no one living upon our earth 
ever prayed so much as did He. He alone 
has perfectly obeyed the apostolic injunction, 
" Pray without ceasing." Prayer stood closely 
related to all the great events of His life — 
His baptism, His temptation, His transfigu- 
ration, His agony in the garden, His crucifix- 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 101 

ion. The night before He chose the twelve 
He was until morning in the mountain alone 
with His Father. When the Roman guard 
came to arrest Him He was by Himself in 
prayer, and did He not die with a prayer 
upon His lips? What a testimony to His 
prayer-life it was that the disciples who took 
the walk to Emmaus with Him the day 
of His resurrection did not identify Him 
till they heard His voice in prayer. We 
sometimes feel that at best we are but chil- 
dren and dare not stir a step alone. This 
was Jesus' characteristic and continuous atti- 
tude. He was supremely the son of solitude, 
yet He was pre-eminently a man among men, 
ever going about doing good. 

This constant converse with His Father 
was the source of His wisdom, His patience 
and poise, His steadfastness and strength, 
His cheerfulness and courage. It was this 
which made 

" His face a mirror of His holy mind, 
His mind a temple for all lovely things to flock to 
And inhabit." 

Living such an uninterrupted prayer-life as 



102 Vision and Service 

this, He came to know the will of God fully 
and explicitly, and His life was lived with 
one sole commanding passion — to make that 
will known to men. The words He spoke, 
the deeds He wrought, the influence breath- 
ing itself forth from His person, His char- 
acter and life, were but the utterance, the 
exaltation of that will. In whatsoever capac- 
ity He appears, as the Messiah of Matthew, 
or the servant of Mark, or the universal 
Saviour of Luke, or the divine Son of God of 
John, He is everywhere and always the syno- 
nym, the embodiment, the interpretation of 
the will of God — the declaration of what 
God thinks, what God desires, what He pur- 
poses and what He delights in — in a word, 
what God is and what He desires man to be. 

" On one great mission bent, 
He sped for God, forever unencumbered 
Of earthly clogs, whereby our souls are numbered, 
In glory excellent." 

There can be no question, then, but that 
He always sought to know and follow the 
will of the Father. That stands forever true. 
But did He perfectly do that will? In other 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 103 

words, it is beyond dispute that doing the will 
of God was the purpose, the pleasure and the 
pursuit of His life. Was this the actual prac- 
tice of Jesus? 

1. The consciousness of Christ is no slight 
or uncertain factor in this problem. All the 
laws of psychology must, do give it emphasis. 
A sane, true, high soul, such as Jesus confess- 
edly was, could have had none other than a 
trustworthy consciousness. When, therefore, 
looking into the face of His Father, He said : 
" I do always the things that please Him," 
and again, " My meat is to do the will of 
Him that sent Me," He established the 
strongest possible presumption in favor of 
His claim. 

2. Another test is His Father's unquali- 
fied approval of Him. This approval would, 
of course, not have been given if He had 
failed to do the will of God. That approval 
is everywhere implied, and the fact that only 
once did Jesus feel Himself without it, and 
that when circumstances for which He was 
not responsible had clouded His conscious- 
ness, strongly confirms the implication. 
Twice, however, this approval was explicitly 



104 Vision and Service 

spoken by the Father from heaven. First, 
at the baptism : " This is My beloved Son in 
whom I am well pleased," a word which 
doubtless covered the whole of His life up to 
that point and is a suggestive key which un- 
locks for us the so-called "hidden years"; 
and again at the transfiguration, when, as St. 
Peter tells us, " He received from God the 
Father honor and glory, when there came 
such a voice to Him from the excellent glory, 
This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well 
pleased." (2 Peter i. 17.) 

3. But better than His self-consciousness 
even, still better than His Father's implied 
or spoken approval, was the sinless life He 
set before the world. His sinlessness was 
more than a self-preferred claim — it was an 
accepted fact. No man did convict Him of 
sin. The prince of this world did come, but 
found nothing in Him. His contemporaries 
testified to His purity, and succeeding ages 
have confirmed the testimony. 

In view of these facts are we not justified 
in accepting it as an absolute fact that Jesus 
did perfectly obey His Father, and that His 
claim is thus firmly established, that doing 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 105 

the will of God was not only the purpose, the 
pleasure and the pursuit of His life, but also 
its actual and constant practice? No other 
soul was equal to Wasson's quaint confession 
as was the Man of Galilee: 

" If I would pray, 
I've naught to say 

But this: That God would be God still. 
For grace to live, 
So still to give, 
And sweeter than my wish His will." 

Is not our next logical question this : What 
was the personal, practical product of such 
perfect practicing of the will divine? What 
sort of a character-structure did it rear? 
What type or pattern did it leave to the 
world? In a word, what kind of a life did 
it produce? Theoretically, the effect of such 
a practicing of the will of God should have 
been the ideal, the perfect. If the will of 
God is the best possible will, if it justifies the 
Bible's representations of it as " that good 
and acceptable and perfect will " of God, if 
John's dictum be true, " He that doeth the 
will of God abideth forever," then three 
things may be demanded of such a person : 



io6 Vision and Service 

i. That the perfect doing of that perfect 
will of God shall produce the highest possible 
character. Why? Because God is the Crea- 
tor, and only He can make such laws as, when 
obeyed, will insure one's being its highest end. 

2. That the perfect doing of the perfect 
will of God shall bring the greatest possible 
happiness. God is the great Father, and He 
would make only those laws for His children 
which, on being obeyed, would contribute to 
their fullest happiness. 

3. That the perfect doing of the perfect 
will of God shall result in the longest possible 
continuance of being. God is eternal, and 
legislates, therefore, only for eternity. God is 
man's great benefactor, and, where His will 
is not intercepted, must preserve my soul 
" from this time forth and even forever- 
more." 

What do we find to have been the case in 
our Lord's life? Did He not fulfill each of 
these three great conditions? He was not 
only the noblest, the purest, the holiest char- 
acter of time, but He is the only perfect man 
our race has produced. Human imagination 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 107 

can picture to itself no higher order of being 
than He. Do not the Norseman's title of 
" The White Christ," and Lanier's represen- 
tation of Him as " The Crystal Christ " com- 
mand universal consent? 

What of the second test? Did not perfect 
obedience to the Father's will yield Him com- 
plete happiness? He was "the man of sor- 
rows," but He was " anointed with the oil 
of gladness " above His fellows. He was 
able to rise above more trial, temptation, 
opposition and hatred than has come to any 
other being on our earth, and yet He was 
calm, serene, brave, and glad through it all. 
" Who, for the joy that was set before Him, 
endured the cross, despising the shame, and is 
set down at the right hand of the throne of 
God." (Heb. xii. 2.) 

Apply the third test — the longest possible 
existence. Is He not by all odds the first of 
the immortals? Was not death powerless to 
hold Him? Is He not now alive forever- 
more? Has He not the keys of Hades and 
death? He who rests his faith in Him may 
sing with the utmost confidence : 



io8 Vision and Ser 



vice 



" To Thy beyond no fear I give ; 
Because Thou livest, I live. 
Unsleeping Friend, why should I wake 
Troublesome thought to take 
For any strange to-morrow? In Thy hand 
Days and eternities like flowers expand. 

" Odors from blossoming worlds unknown 
Across my path are blown ; 
Thy robes trail myrrh and spice 
From farthest Paradise; 

I walk through Thy fair universe with Thee, 
And sun me in Thine immortality." 

And now, having reached this high point, 
where are we? We have looked upon His 
claim that God's will was the guiding star, 
nay, the rising sun, of His life; we have ex- 
amined the facts upon which that master 
claim rests, and assured ourselves that it was 
warrantable and conclusive. We have scru- 
tinized the effect of Christ's obedience and 
found it yielded a normal product, answering 
the soul's threefold aspiration for a perfect, 
happy and continuing existence. Are we not, 
therefore, face to face with the question as 
to what is the essential, practical import of 
all this for us? Surely it can have but one 
explicit and ethical meaning. It is this: that 
if we would come out at a like goal, we must 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 109 

take the same path Jesus chose. Do we want 
to attain to the highest character? Do we 
want abiding happiness? Do we crave a true 
immortality? All this has bu"t one secret — 
doing the will of the Father in heaven. Until 
Christ's secret is ours we shall not fulfill the 
genius of our being; we shall chafe and fret, 
be ill at ease and generally unhappy; and the 
life within us instead of expanding will grow 
shallow and negative and gradually die out. 

Ah! this is our difficulty. Our wills are 
in command, and not God's will. Victor 
Hugo once said, " Men do not lack strength, 
but will." And it is God's will they lack. By 
so much as that will is not ours, by so much 
our characters are defective, our hearts dis- 
cordant, our lives devitalized. No one has 
got closer to this truth, it would seem to me, 
than our Quaker poet, who has in a single 
verse forever signalized the thought: 

" And so I sometimes think our prayers 
Might well be merged in one; 
And nest and perch and hearth and church 
Repeat, ' Thy will be done.' " 

This step but leads to another. Having 



no Vision and Service 

come face to face with this secret of secrets, 
we ask most eagerly how we may make it 
ours. How may we be sure that we have 
taken God's will? We do well to ask that 
question, for there is a great deal of talk in 
these days about absolute surrender which is 
ignorant, unscriptural, unphilosophical, and 
generally wide of the mark. In many quar- 
ters the word surrender has become scarcely 
more than a shibboleth. People talk glibly 
of surrender who do not know what surren- 
der means. 

( i ) To begin with, it is not a thing of the 
emotions, but solely of the will. It is, there- 
fore, a step to be taken deliberately, dispas- 
sionately, and, above all, positively. I have 
known people to declare their surrender when 
they were under excited feeling, who were 
at the time as little capable of taking so seri- 
ous a step as a child. 

(2) It is a thing of fact and not fancy. A 
prominent religious teacher, speaking to a 
great conference of Christian people a few 
years ago, suggested that only when one 
could sign his name to a blank sheet of paper 
and hand it back to God for Him to fill in 



The Secret of Jesus' Life in 

as He chose, was he really justified in profess- 
ing surrender. I submit that this is a specious 
test, and its effect most unwholesome. Im- 
agine Christ working Himself up into such 
an unreal state. He dealt with the will of 
God as it came to Him at the time, and not 
as it might address itself to Him at some 
future juncture. The call which God's will 
makes to us in the present is the only true 
test of surrender. God has put me in a hard 
place ; do I accept it from Him and in no way 
fight against the appointment? My position 
is not what I like, but God keeps me in it. 
Am I content therewith? My life is an aim- 
less, circumscribed one — a treadmill, a tedi- 
ous round, the dead level of the commonplace. 
Am I willing to keep on and be cheerful, if 
God does not turn me upon another path ? 

(3) And this, mark you well, is only the 
first step — the beginning. Surrender, as I 
understand it, is a compound act — I had 
almost said a complex act. It is a ladder of 
three rungs, set far apart and mounted only 
by long, hard strides. The first rung is sub- 
mission to God's will — resignation, as we 
more commonly express it. The second is 



ii2 Vision and Service 

obedience to God's will. Not merely accept- 
ing it negatively, as if there were no other 
alternative, but giving ourselves gladly, fully, 
loyally to its fulfillment. The third is exalting 
God's will — accounting it and rejoicing in it 
as the best possible will. Faber was standing 
on this top rung when he breathed that im- 
mortal prayer : 



" I worship Thee, sweet will of God, 
And all thy ways adore; 
And every day I live, I seem 
To love Thee more and more. 

"He always wins who sides with God; 
To him no chance is lost. 
God's will seems sweetest to him when 
It triumphs at his cost. 

" 111 that He blesses is our good, 
And unblest good is ill; 
And all is right that seems most wrong, 
If it be His sweet will." 



How many of us have brought our feet 
to that rung? Until we have, we cannot 
make claim to full surrender to the will of 
God, but if we have reached that high and 
holy station, we are fast becoming our truest 



The Secret of Jesus' Life 113 

and best selves; it will be easy to be brave 
and sweet and reposeful, and natural for us 
to be happy ; and we shall rise above all ordi- 
nary temporal limitations, passing out of the 
bondage of the material into the glorious life 
and liberty of the sons of God. 



THE PLACE OF FEAR 
IN RELIGION 



The fear of the Lord is a fountain 



of life. 



Proverbs xiv. 2J 



THE PLACE OF FEAR 
IN RELIGION 

rHE fear of God is another name 
for the love of God, they used to 
tell me when I was a lad. But I 
could not see it then; I have not been able 
to see it at any time since; nor do I see it 
now. It has always been possible — even in 
the days of my childhood it was so — to under- 
stand how the fear of God leads to the love 
of God, since we can love no one whom we 
do not first respect and honor; but to believe 
that love can take the place of fear, or that 
love is the same thing as fear, seems to-day, 
as it has ever seemed, an impossibility, yes, 
an absurdity. 

That I am right, certain scriptures, whose 
meaning is unmistakable, make it more than 
117 



1 1 8 Vision and Service 

certain. In them it is perfectly plain that 
holy men enjoined a feeling toward God such 
as is ordinarily implied by the word fear. 
" Let all the earth fear the Lord; let all the 
inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him." 
(Ps. xxxiii. 8.) Fear, there, obviously, does 
not mean love, but awe. " Work out your 
own salvation with fear and trembling." 
(Phil. ii. 12.) Fear implies, in this case, 
something that makes one tremble. Has love 
that effect? " Let us have grace, whereby we 
may serve God acceptably with reverence and 
godly fear: for our God is a consuming fire." 
(Heb. xii. 28.) Fear, in this instance, ex- 
presses itself in reverence, and it is the reali- 
zation that God is a consuming fire that 
awakens it. 

But not only is it scriptural to believe that 
the fear of God is a different thing from the 
love of God ; reason and experience both tell 
us that it is. Fear and love ever bestir differ- 
ent faculties in our being. They are never 
identical emotions in our relations to any 
other person ; why should they be in our rela- 
tions to God? Our respect for our parents 
when we were children produced a totally dif- 



The Place of Fear in Religion 119 

ferent sensation from our love for them. The 
same difference follows from the fear and the 
love of God. One springs from a contem- 
plation of His sterner qualities and begets 
reverence and awe; the other from meditat- 
ing upon the milder qualities of His nature 
and gives rise to love. If we have no place 
in our religion for the fear of God, we appre- 
hend but one side of God's nature, and He is 
to us, whether we realize it or not, neither a 
normal nor a perfect being, and therefore not 
God in the truest and fullest sense. 

Therefore the people who magnify the 
mercy of God and minimize, or, as some do, 
blot out His majesty, not only have a one- 
sided, partial religion, but their God is only a 
fraction of the true God. Their ideas of 
Him are disproportionate, incomplete, and 
their response to Him cannot therefore be al- 
together normal or true. 

And it is in this very direction that the 
tendency of the times is leading us. " Preach 
the love of God and let the law go," is the 
clamor of the day. " Men can be led, but not 
driven. A religion that a man is frightened 
into is a poor kind of a religion to have. That 



120 Vision and Service 

is the Old Testament, and we want the New. 
We are encamped not under Mt. Sinai, but 
under Mt. Calvary, where the message to men 
is not ' Go and do,' but ' Come and be.' " 

Such phrases sound well, but they are spe- 
cious. As if God ever ceased to speak to the 
conscience; as if religion could under any 
conditions resolve itself into simple emotions; 
as if a man could once take a clear look into 
the majesty and might of Him who is the 
blessed and only Potentate, the King of Kings 
and Lord of Lords, who only hath immor- 
tality, dwelling in the light which no man can 
approach unto; whom no man hath seen or 
can see, and not feel his own littleness and in- 
feriority; as if a soul could ever truly worship 
Jehovah and thereafter put His glory out of 
its thought. Never, beloved, never. And it 
is yielding to this false trend of the times, this 
unbalanced talk about the love of God, that 
has robbed the religion of the day of its viril- 
ity and left it in some quarters scarcely more 
than a sentiment or a form. 

Not that the love of God should not be 
preached, believed in, and mused upon always 



The Place of Fear in Religion 121 

and fully, but that it should not be allowed 
to exclude or even overshadow the opposite 
qualities of His being until we come to think 
we believe, and try to get others to believe 
with us, that fearing God and loving God are 
one and the same thing. You might as well 
try to say that joy and sorrow are identical; 
or pain and pleasure; or hope and despair; or 
hatred and love. Not until God changes — 
and that will never be — and not until He 
changes us — and this change He will never 
make either — can the love of God and the 
fear of God become the same or change 
places. 

Queen Victoria knew the difference be- 
tween love and fear, respect and affection, in 
her children, when she rebuked her son, now 
King Edward VII, for his undue familiarity 
in her presence, and bade him remember that, 
while she was his mother, she was also the 
Queen of England. If we did not adminis- 
ter such a rebuke occasionally in our homes, 
what would become of our authority? Nay, 
not that so much — for as compared with the 
other this is of little importance — what would 



122' Vision and Service 

become of our children's characters? Oh! if 
we did but know it, how God rebukes our fa- 
miliarity with Him, our forwardness, our 
lack of reverence, our indifference to His 
majesty, our disregard of His eternal sov- 
ereignty and might, bidding us remember 
that, while He is our Father and the God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, plenteous 
in mercy " and most wonderfully kind," He 
is at the same time and always the God of the 
Universe, the Beginning and the End, the 
King eternal, immortal, invisible, Jehovah, 
the great I Am. 

The wise man was not wrong, therefore, 
when he said, " The fear of the Lord is a 
fountain of life," nor the Psalmist when he 
wrote, " The fear of the Lord is the begin- 
ning of wisdom," nor the early Christians 
when, as is recorded of them, they " walked 
in the fear of the Lord " as well as in 
"the comfort of the Holy Ghost"; nor the 
Poet when he prayed, " Unite my heart to fear 
Thy name " ; nor Tennyson when he said that 
there were times when his only prayer was, 
"O thou Infinite, Amen"; nor James For- 
dyce when back in the last century he replied 



The Place of Fear in Religion 123 

to one who had apologized for swearing in his 
presence, in these rhythmic words: 

"Henceforth, the majesty of God revere. 
Fear Him, and you have nothing else to fear." 

No, they were none of them wrong, nor am 
I wrong in pleading for a place in your relig- 
ious lives for the fear of God — a sharper, 
clearer vision of the great white Throne, a 
fuller realization and an oftener thought of 
the majesty of God, an elevation of the con- 
science to a higher, more commanding place 
in your life, a recognition, practical and undi- 
vided, not only of the law of love, but of the 
law behind all love, and without which there 
could be no love, or if there were it would be 
too weak, too flabby, too superficial a thing 
to continue to hold the name. Did you ever 
sum up the promises which God makes to 
those who fear Him? Note such as these: 
" The secret of the Lord is with them that 
fear Him " (Ps. xxv. 14) ; " The angel of the 
Lord encampeth round about them that fear 
Him and delivereth them" (Ps. xxxiv. 7); 
" The Lord pitieth them that fear Him " (Ps. 
ciii.13) ; " Surely His salvation is nigh them 



124 Vision and Service 

that fear Him" (Ps. lxxxv. 9); " He will 
fulfill the desire of them that fear Him " 
(Ps. cxlv. 19). 

Only throw the plummet down into this 
fountain and its depth will surprise you. 

( 1 ) Humility is one of the issues of the 
fear of God. How insignificant a man ap- 
pears to himself when his soul is awed before 
the glory and holiness of Jehovah ! And 
what sort of a grace is humility? The ancients 
ranked it as " the head of which all the other 
virtues together were the body." 

(2) Accountability soon springs into life, 
too, when the fear of God is in control. When 
justice and judgment come into sight as the 
habitation of God's throne, we realize how 
strict is the account we must render at last, and 
a deep sense of responsibility settles into the 
soul. 

(3) Flowing from the same spring is a 
current called faith. No matter how much 
I may love God, how can I trust Him if I 
do not realize His might? It is the Throne 
that gives the Cross its background, putting 
power behind it and efficiency into it. Had 
it been any other than " the mighty God, the 



The Place of Fear in Religion 125 

everlasting Father, " who died for our salva- 
tion, how limited that salvation would have 
been. Not till I fear God can I fully trust 
Him. 

(4) And strange as it may seem — yet why 
strange? — true love has its source in the fear 
of God. I look upon the Throne and behold 
the glory of Him who sits upon it, a glory 
that dazzles my sight and makes my soul 
tremble before its whiteness, and then I look 
over to the Cross and behold its Victim, and 
this is my exclamation: " Did God come all 
that way for me ! Are yonder Monarch and 
yonder Victim one and the same ! Such con- 
descension is stupendous. Love like this is 
a glorious, majestic, awful thing.' , 

" There's a wideness in God's mercy, 
Like the wideness of the sea." 

Of such love I am unworthy. It hum- 
bles me. It makes me tremble. I fear God, 
and I love Him the more because I do fear 
Him. 

When one thus traces the lineage of the 
fear of God, he understands what Paul meant 
when he spoke of " perfecting holiness in the 



126 Vision and Service 

fear of God" (II Cor. vii. i). Without 
it we shall grow a race of bastards with no 
fear of God before their eyes; with it ours 
will become a sturdy and virile Christianity 
that shall have true life within it and the full 
power of God upon it. 



SOUL RE-WINNING 



"For if after they have escaped the 
pollutions of the world through the 
knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus 
Christ, they are again entangled therein, 
and overcome, the latter end is worse 
with them than the beginning. For it 
had been better for them not to have 
known the way of righteousness, than, 
after they have known it, to turn from 
the holy commandment delivered unto 
them!' 

II Peter ii. 20-21 



SOUL RE-WINNING 

Aj DISTINGUISHED clergyman of 
ZJ New York City, in addressing a 
^ JL representative body of Metropoli- 
tan Christians not long since, made the 
somewhat startling statement that the great- 
est problem which the church of to-day had 
to solve was not to save sinners but saints. 
The surprise which his remark at first awak- 
ened was lessened, if not dissipated altogether, 
when he went on to declare his meaning to be 
that there was a great tier of earnest-minded, 
right-living men and women who believed in 
Jesus Christ, respected Him, and secretly de- 
sired to follow Him, but who held themselves 
altogether aloof from the church, refusing in 
any way to affiliate with its orginizations or to 
129 



130 Vision and Service 

identify themselves with its enterprises, and 
that to make any impression upon them or to 
persuade them to give anything like a positive 
response to the church's overtures, was far 
more difficult than to evangelize the hardened 
classes, such as the inebriate or the libertine, 
and commit them to a religious life. 

Who is prepared to contravene this cler- 
gyman's statement as thus interpreted by him- 
self? The drift away from the church to- 
day is one of the appalling religious facts of 
our times. Saddening as it is to see a chasm 
yawning between the great unbelieving world 
and the church, yet to witness a breach stead- 
ily widening between our Christian institu- 
tions and people whom one cannot really clas- 
sify as of the world, whose traditions and 
whose convictions are all Christian, who by 
good rights belong with us and should be 
marching shoulder to shoulder with us in the 
conquest of this generation for Christ, is a 
condition even more deplorable, presenting, 
confessedly, a problem so intricate and a task 
so difficult as to seem well-nigh discouraging. 

This exodus from the church is in some 
quarters a veritable stampede. Such surely 



Soul Re-winning 131 

it is in our great cities. People who were 
once most punctilious in their attendance upon 
public worship, and who still call themselves 
Christians, think nothing of absenting them- 
selves altogether from the services of the 
church, and have no compunction in allowing 
their children to grow up, not only without 
any Sunday School training — that is not so 
strange, considering the character of much of 
our teaching there — but without any religious 
instruction as its substitute. Speak to them 
about this dereliction, and they will not offer 
an excuse, as was formerly their usual rule, 
but they will defend their course and maintain 
with evident sincerity that they no longer re- 
gard church attendance as an essential factor 
of the Christian life. 

This tendency operates chiefly with the two 
extremes of society, though the great interme- 
diate class is by no means free from its influ- 
ence. There is very little church attendance 
among Protestant servants, while the Ameri- 
can workingman is notoriously a religious 
alien. Conditions are, if possible, even more 
discouraging at the opposite social pole. It 
would almost seem that the more command- 



132 Vision and Service 

ing one's social, commercial, or intellectual 
position, the looser and the more negative his 
relation to the church. How little do our 
university faculties contribute to the organ- 
ized life or work of our city churches ! How 
seldom the mantle of a large giver falls, in 
the event of his decease, upon the shoulders 
of a worthy successor! Nowhere is this drift 
more noticeable than in our newer residential 
districts, where people just coming into wealth 
find new and better homes. 

Is not the task of reaching and winning 
these people as difficult as any that could come 
to our hand? They are of all others the 
most self-satisfied and self-sufficient. They 
would spurn as a base reflection any inti- 
mation that they are not Christian people. 
They are trading upon their past religious 
credit, pointing to what they once were in 
the church, or what they once did for the 
church, as the passport into perpetual relig- 
ious ease and indifference. Converting the 
heathen, redeeming the confirmed and noto- 
riously wicked, is as nothing compared with 
re-winning these present-day quasi-saints. 

Up to this point we have had in mind 



Soul Re-winning 133 

those who at present are outside of our 
churches. What do we find within the 
church? At least three classes that need re- 
winning. 

( 1 ) A large body of men and women — 
chiefly men — living excellent lives and breath- 
ing a noble spirit, who love the things of 
Christ as much as we do or could, but who de- 
cline to be actively associated either with the 
membership or the work of the church. Were 
they living sinful lives, you could appeal to 
their consciences and induce repentance; but 
the fact is they are as good, as true, as sincere, 
as moral as the people who honor the institu- 
tions and ordinances of the church, indeed, in 
many cases far more so, and to win them to 
your position is as hard a task as the Chris- 
tian worker finds. 

(2) The second class consists of those who 
have formally connected themselves with the 
church, but since that time their attitude to- 
ward it has been that of the man who said he 
had so much respect for the truth that he 
seldom used it. Their names are upon our 
books — in the retired rolls, it is to be hoped — ■ 
and they do occasionally turn up, oftener at 



134 Vision and Service 

some social than religious function, but they 
are practically the unchurched within the 
church, and they will have to be re-won to 
Christ before they can be made His faithful 
followers or His worthy representatives. It 
would seem a heterodox thing to speak of a 
second conversion, but something very like 
unto that will have to take place before you 
can account such people saved. 

(3) The third class is made up of those 
who go through all the motions of the relig- 
ious life, are faithful in their relations to 
the church, but whose religion, as Carlyle de- 
scribes it, is only " algebraic piety " — the 
symbol without the substance, or, as Brown- 
ing calls it with equal aptness, " Dramatic 
Christianity," playing, not living religion. 
Such ones, if they have ever known Jesus 
Christ as a great reality, have receded from 
that high point, and must be re-won if they 
are to have an experience that is either deep 
or real. 

Where, now, are we to locate the respon- 
sibility for this unfortunate trend of the age? 
There are those who refer it entirely to the 
temper of the times. This, say they, is a 



Soul Re-winning 135 

commercial age, and the last thing people are 
interested in is laying up treasures in heaven. 
Or it is a pleasure-seeking age, given to self- 
gratification and self-indulgence, and it finds 
no congeniality, of course, in a religion of 
self-denial and cross-bearing. Or an age of 
loose thinking, in which the inclination is to 
bank everything spiritual upon the love of 
God and let the future settle its own accounts. 
Or it is declared to be a selfish age, so bent 
upon what is immediately advantageous that 
eternity with its remote and invisible interests 
fails to address to men any strong or winsome 
appeal. 

All this may accurately describe the age — 
doubtless in general outline it is a faithful 
photograph — but to me it seems far wide of 
the mark as a contribution to the solution of 
the problem before us. Suppose the age is 
not favorable to our conquest, and the condi- 
tions untoward. What else might we expect? 
And with the equipment we carry as the host 
of the Lord are we justified in resting all the 
blame for failure there? Did not Christian- 
ity contend against greater odds in the first 
century, the third, the eighth, the sixteenth 



136 Vision and Service 

and eighteenth centuries, and yet in every in- 
stance conquer and conquer gloriously? Has 
the church of Christ had its commission with- 
drawn since then? Is the gospel of redemp- 
tion less the power of God unto salvation to 
everyone that believeth? 

If a remedy that has lost none of its virtue 
ceases to produce its former results, where 
must the fault be placed but upon the one ad- 
ministering it? With the same gospel in its 
hand, the same Spirit vouchsafed unto it, the 
same redeeming purpose behind it, and the 
same sign upon its banners, if the church is 
failing to-day, it is hers to accuse and not to 
excuse herself. 

" Dark is the world to thee ? 
Thyself is the reason why," 

may well be her soliloquy. Her method 
must be defective, or her face in the wrong 
direction, or she has been stripped of her 
power. Something surely is wanting, and 
she could do nothing better just now — indeed, 
she will be driven to it in self-defense or for 
self-preservation — than to give herself to the 
sharpest, deepest self-examination, repenting 



Soul Re-winning 137 

of her discovered shortcomings in sackcloth 
and ashes. 

There are not less than four great require- 
ments which, in my judgment, must be 
squarely met by the church of to-day before it 
will be able to do this work of soul re-winning 
as it should be done and as it is possible to 
do it. 

I. It must live a more winsome life be- 
fore these people, before all people. Is it not 
a common saying these days — we must all 
confess to hearing it on every hand — that 
there seems little, if any, difference between 
those belonging to the world and those who 
belong to the church? " The meanest, small- 
est, least scrupulous men I meet," said a 
prominent citizen of this city to me the other 
day, " are church people." This may be an 
extreme statement, but that it has a broader 
basis to rest upon than we will ordinarily ad- 
mit to others, is more than certain. 

Nor can we find relief in the reflection, 
doubtless in itself a warrantable one, that the 
average Christian of to-day lives a cleaner, 
higher, nobler life than did the average Chris- 
tian of a century ago. That ought to be most 



138 Vision and Service 

markedly the case with the superior advan- 
tages, the nobler ideals, the richer influences 
that are his. The fact is a church with half 
of our present membership, yes, one-tenth, 
made up of consecrated souls on fire with 
God, on fire for God, carrying His light about 
with them in their faces, His love radiating 
out from their lives, would do far more to 
win lost souls and re-win lapsed souls than 
the church of to-day will ever be able to do, 
with all its numbers and all its machinery, but 
weighed down under the incubus of so many 
contradictory, if not incriminating, lives. 

II. The church is bound to preach a more 
winsome gospel, if she would do this w T ork of 
soul re-winning. I do not mean by this that 
the pulpit should give itself more completely 
to the theme of God's love — I shall surely not 
be misunderstood when I say that our evan- 
gelical ministers are emphasizing the love of 
God with sufficient, if not undue, faithful- 
ness. There is altogether too much preach- 
ing among us which tends to emasculate the 
fatherhood of God. 

No, I would not by any means place the 
accent here. The people in every age, and in 



Soul Re-winning 139 

none more than in this, have demanded three 
notes in the chord which the pulpit is set to 
sound : 

( 1 ) The first of these is certainty — a con- 
viction of the truth he utters which com- 
mands the preacher to the core. " That which 
you believe with all your soul and with all 
your might and all your strength, and are 
ready to face Tophet for — that for you," said 
Carlyle, " is the truth." Any other kind of 
preaching repels men — in the nature of the 
case it cannot win them. 

" That which issues from the heart alone 

Will bend the hearts of others to your own." 

(2) The second note is reality — truth 
which has passed through the preacher's own 
experience and evidenced itself in his life. 

(3) The third is authority, truth straight 
from God, a vision seen in the mount and 
brought by the preacher down to the people 
on the plain. It is because the pulpit has so 
seldom for the people a message from God 
that the people feel so little need of the pul- 
pit. When the ministers of the Word be- 
come the prophets of the Lord, speaking 



140 Vision and Service 

forth what they verily believe, what they 
have felt in their own hearts, and what they 
have received of God, the lapsed and the lost 
will both turn to the church as the doves seek 
their windows at nightfall. 

I find myself less and less sympathetic with 
those who are worried about the lessening 
number of candidates for the ministry. To 
me this is one of the most encouraging signs 
of the times. Instead of urging a man to enter 
the ministry, I would help to make this as dif- 
ficult for him as possible. If there were no 
obstacles in a candidate's way, I would put 
some there. When there is a revival of the 
Pauline " woe " in the pulpit, there will be a 
mighty revival of the religion of Jesus in our 
churches. 

III. The church will need to turn a more 
winsome face to the world, if it would do this 
work which is laid to its hand. What do I 
mean by that? Recall the schism which still 
divides the church, much of it based upon 
non-essentials, and you will know. Observe 
how the affairs of many, yes, I venture to say, 
of most of our churches are managed; how 
suffused they are with a commercial spirit; 



Soul Re-winning 141 

how much of narrowness and strife and petti- 
ness still marks their life and labor; how 
worldly are their people; how essentially of 
the earth earthy are their enterprises; how 
much like the running of machinery their or- 
ganizations, and one of the highest barriers to 
the work of soul-winning will at once stand 
out before you. Again and again have I had 
men of this city tell me that they dared not, 
after their former experiences, return to act- 
ive part in the work of the church, lest disen- 
chantment might ensue and their religious 
lives thereby lose their glow and vigor. With 
such a face turned toward the unsaved, is it 
strange that they should fail to be allured 
churchward? 

IV. Still again, if the church would sub- 
stitute success for failure in this mission of 
hers, she must do a more winsome work. Say 
what we may, is it not still true, shamefully 
true, that the church has assumed an indif- 
ferent attitude toward the class we now have 
in mind, or at least been singularly inactive 
in their behalf? 

( 1 ) How utterly neglectful of discipline 
she has been in this country ! If the age fails to 



142 Vision and Service 

detect any sharp difference between the church 
and the world, has it not been in a large de- 
gree due to the fact that we have failed to es- 
tablish and exalt that difference? The tares 
and the wheat grow together, and nothing 
this side of the judgment day would seem to 
threaten their separation. Soul re-winning in 
many quarters is simply waiting upon church 
discipline. 

(2) How little attention our churches 
give to Christian nurture ! In too many cases 
we persuade young people and children, with 
a great show of zeal, to join the church, and 
then drop them forthwith. Thenceforth they 
are allowed to go their own way, and that 
way leads usually straight back to their for- 
mer habits and associations, and the last es- 
tate is, not only as bad, it is worse than the 
first. Is it too strong a position to take that 
no church should attempt to make converts 
until it is prepared to take care of them? 

(3) Not only have church discipline and 
Christian nurture been too sadly wanting 
among us, but there has been a deplorable 
lack of personal work with and for the class in 
question. If there is little individual work 



Soul Re-winning 143 

for the individual among the lost, there is 
even less among the lapsed. How far, as a 
rule, does the continuing absence of a pew- 
holder give a pew-neighbor anxiety? New 
members pass into the church and out again 
without even our officers feeling any very 
heavy burden of soul for them. You can get 
ten men and ten women, yes, a hundred, to 
do committee work where you can get one to 
assume the least responsibility for the spiritual 
well-being of a fellow-member. Women will 
make social calls on the new people, but you 
can scarcely hire the most pious of them to 
make personal work calls either for a lost 
sheep or for one who is only straying. 

A pastor in one of our cities— let his name 
remain unspoken — noticed recently that one 
of the young women of his membership 
showed suspicious signs of slipping away. He 
did not like the increasing ruddiness of her 
complexion, and the expensive clothes she was 
wearing so contradicted the frugality of her 
home that he was naturally anxious for her. 
His own efforts in her behalf seemed unavail- 
ing, and he felt she needed a woman's touch. 
He went thereupon to one of his good women, 



144 Vision and Service 

an active church worker, told her the facts, 
and asked her to give the young woman 
especial and immediate attention. She cheer- 
fully accepted the charge and promised faith- 
fully to fulfill it. A whole month elapsed and 
nothing had been heard from the young 
woman. Inquiring what had been done, what 
was the pastor's surprise to learn that his faith- 
ful church worker had not yet undertaken her 
task. She said she had been too busy, but she 
had not been too busy to attend the theater 
three times a week since then, to go regularly 
to her euchre club, nor to spend an afternoon 
or two a week tramping about making society 
calls. Failing in this instance, he turned to a 
second good woman of his church, one who al- 
ways attended the women's prayer meetings 
and indulged freely in pious talk. She also 
made fair promises, but kept them no better 
than her busy sister. She gave her much 
church work as an excuse for her neglect. 
She had plenty of time to get up entertain- 
ments, but none to give to an imperiled soul. 
Then he made another attempt, this time 
with a Christian Endeavorer of the zealous 
type, but she was no prompter in her services 



Soul Re-winning 145 

than her predecessors. Finally, in desperation, 
he turned to a deaconess of the church, and 
in order to lay the burden heavily upon her 
heart he quoted to her the third chapter of 
Ezekiel, and warned her of carrying this 
young woman's blood upon her conscience. 
This fourth woman went straightway upon 
her mission, only to find that matters were far 
worse than even the pastor had supposed. 
The young woman could not be found at 
home — she spent all her evenings out. So the 
visitor sought her at her place of business, and 
the diamond rings which bestudded her fin- 
gers, the dyed hair, an unmistakable cast in 
the eye, told the sad story of her ruin. While 
God's people had been tarrying, playing with 
the world, or trying to satisfy their consciences 
with unimportant work, one of His children 
had been lost to decency, honor and virtue. 

" So many tender words and true 
We meant to speak, dear heart, to you; 
So many things we meant to do, 
But we forgot. 

" The busy days were full of care, 
The long nights fell, and, unaware, 
You passed beyond life's leading prayer, 
While we forgot." 



ONE STEP AT A TIME 



"And as thy days, so shall thy 
strength be." 

Deuteronomy xxxiii. 2$ 



ONE STEP AT A TIME 

A WORD FOR THE NEW YEAR 

/^NE of the first pictures ever hung 
m J upon the walls of my memory — it 
\~r well-nigh begins the gallery's cata- 
logue, I think — is of our old farm team tread- 
ing composedly, not to say lazily, the rude, 
old-fashioned threshing machine. You have 
seen them many a time — a revolving endless 
platform set up at such an angle that the 
horses must continue to tread, and as they do 
so keep the platform going round and round 
in wearying succession. 

I used to watch the performance for hours 
— a performance it was to us children, no the- 
ater play could have ever been more interest- 
ing. As I watched I experienced a growing 
pity for the horses, and tried to imagine the 
thoughts which the old nags — to a child 
149 



150 Vision and Service 

horses always think, and any animal is like 
unto a human — were thinking the while ; 
thoughts of dread, of protest and of discour- 
agement, I was certain, as they looked for- 
ward to the hard, long, tedious round of the 
day. 

I soon found, however, that my pity was 
misspent. When the time came that the horses 
slipped out of the human category and took 
their places, in my thought, among the brute 
creation, I learned that looking ahead was just 
what the faithful old beasts didn't do, but 
that they took one step at a time, and, if 
they had any mental agitation corresponding 
to our thought, it was expended upon the act 
of the immediate moment; and that this was 
what gave them contentment and saved them 
from dread, discouragement and protest. 

What an object lesson! If there are " ser- 
mons in stones and books in the running 
brooks," there may be helpful homilies even 
in a creaky threshing machine. Xo lesson 
set me in college was ever better learned than 
this one which our old farm horses, acting as 
my instructors, taught me in childhood. 

One step at a time — that is the lesson for 



One Step at a Time 151 

the new year. You follow a treadmill — the 
household round, the routine of the office, the 
monotonous swing of duty's daily scythe? 
Yes, with most of us in these modern, intense, 
strenuous days, the threshing machine is not 
called into service for a month and then put 
away for the rest of the year, but it is in con- 
stant requisition. It is an unbroken tread, 
tread, and all the while up hill. " Don't look 
down at the machine; keep looking up," say 
the horses. " Don't count the steps, but take 
one step at a time and forget the count." To 
let a poet talk in the horses' stead: 

" Lord, I have often asked 

Strength for a year; 
I wanted all the mists 

To disappear, 
That I might see my way 

And walk therein; 
And gird myself with strength 

The fight to win. 
The summer and the winter 

Spread before, 
Nor be afraid to climb 

The mountains o'er. 

" But now I am 
A child again, 
Fearing the darkness, 
And afraid of pain. 



1 52 Vision and Service 

A ;ear is long; 

I am content wWi days; 

I want the Lord to govern 

All my ways 
What He 5-:: give me 

Is enough for me : 
I know that is my Jays 

My s:rer.g:o. shall be." 

This is the course to take toward the man- 
ifold, yes. the multiform, uncertainties ahead 
of us to-day. The word which stands out the 
boldest in the inscription over the gateway of 
the new year is that taunting, humbling, un- 
nerving adjective, "unknown." Which of 
us will be ill. which surer losses, which be 
called upon to part with dear ones? What 
mother shall have to lay her sweet-faced 
babe away; what daughter shall be obliged 
to bid her gracious mother good-bye — who 
knows? All oi the future is to all of us one 
great uncertainty. But God knows, and isn't 
that enough? How sweet the refrain this 
morning ! We could scarcely do better 
let it hum itself into our hearts throughout 
the day: 

;, He knows. He knows, my heavenly Father knows, 
And tempers every wir.d that blon 



One Step at a Time 153 

Better we shouldn't know. How much 
would it help us if we did? " God kindly 
veils the way." He meant to shut us up to 
one step at a time. Then let us be content 
with the gait. Let's not try to guess the fu- 
ture; 'twould be wild guessing if we did. 
Let's not even think about it, much less set 
ourselves to imagining it. 

One of our good women was telling me not 
long since of a young lady she found in bit- 
ter tears, who, when she asked her the mat- 
ter, answered: " Oh I was thinking." " What 
were you thinking of?" "I was thinking: 
What if I should be married and should have 
a sweet baby girl and the baby should get 
sick and die, booh ! hoo ! how could I ever 
bear it!" "Poor, foolish girl!" you say, 
" she would have strength to watch when 
the babe fell ill, strength that would sur- 
prise her; and courage and hope would come 
and help her take up her burden and trudge 
on again. Poor, foolish girl, to work her- 
self into such a useless state." Poor, fool- 
ish you ! That's what you've done, many a 
time. That's what you are doing, perhaps, 
this very morning. Be done with mere senti- 



154 Vision and Service 

ment at New Year's time. Reason is then our 
most serviceable faculty. Don't dream; rea- 
son it through. Stay out of the clouds. Keep 
hard down on the commonplace, matter-of- 
fact earth and reckon with what is just be- 
fore you. One step at a time! 

" To-day, unsullied, comes to thee new born, 
To-morrow is not thine; 
The sun may cease to shine 
For thee, ere earth shall greet its morn. 

" Be earnest, then, in thought and deed, 
Nor fear approaching night; 
Calm comes with evening light, 
And hope and peace. To-day thy duty heed ! " 

But if the New Year opens fraught with 
so many uncertainties, it has also in store for 
us experiences about which we may be quite as 
sure as we are doubtful regarding the others, 
and " one step at a time " is the method to pur- 
sue toward these. We all start forth upon the 
life of the year as Paul told the Ephesian 
elders he began his journey to Jerusalem. 
You remember his word (Acts xx. 22) : 
" And now, behold, I go bound in the spirit 
unto Jerusalem, not knowing the things that 



One Step at a Time 155 

shall befall me there, save that the Holy 
Ghost witnesseth in every city, saying that 
bonds and afflictions abide me." Though we 
do not know what shall befall us this twelve- 
month, we do know what abides us therein. 
Toil, struggle, responsibility, pressure, care, 
temptation — these may be set down as cer- 
tain. How exacting the program of the year 
looks to most of us. Were we not obliged 
to drive ourselves back to the old round yes- 
terday? " Another year of this! " we caught 
ourselves saying. The very changelessness 
of our lives — that sounds strange, doesn't it? 
but, as everyone who reads this knows, it is 
not strange — is sometimes the thing most un- 
nerving about them. How can I keep this 
strain up for another year? Will I be equal 
to the financial obligation which I know the 
coming months are sure to bring to me ? Will 
my health hold out under the burden that is 
upon me as I cross this boundary with so long 
a stretch before me? These are only a few 
of the questions that are bound to present 
themselves the moment we stop and think. 
Answer them as Mr. McKinley told a friend 
of mine he answered the administrative ques- 



156 Vision and Service 

tions that came to him. It was just at the 
opening of the Spanish-American War. Crit- 
icisms were being freely spoken throughout 
the country. It was uncertain what course 
the other great nations would follow. All 
looked dark; the responsibility of steering 
the Ship of State through such a fog was ter- 
rific. But the great President was brave, 
steady, well-poised throughout it all, and he 
gave his secret away when he said to my 
friend: "These are terrible days, but I am 
taking one step at a time." Will this not ex- 
plain his choice of Cardinal Newman's hymn 
as his favorite ? — why he wanted sung to him 
when he was dying those beautiful words 
we are all so fond of singing, but often sing, 
I fear, without giving them their true mean- 
ing: 

"Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see 
The distant scene; one step enough for me." 

It is with the tasks and burdens and strug- 
gles of life, I find more and more, as it was 
with our examinations in college. They had to 
be reckoned with one by one, as they came 
along on the schedule. If we worried about 



One Step at a Time 157 

and tried to prepare for the Greek examina- 
tion two days ahead, while we were getting 
ready for the Latin test that was to come the 
next day, the probability was that we would 
flunk in both. 

If there is one man above another who to- 
day needs to adopt this motto, " One step at 
a time," it is the man who begins the New 
Year with some freshly formed resolution — a 
habit he is going to try to break, a reform he 
is setting himself to bring about, a religious 
advance he will seek to accomplish. As he 
will eat one meal at a time, never thinking of 
making one visit to the table supply the phys- 
ical demand of a week to come; as he will 
take his nightly sleep, or plan to do so, as the 
nights of the year come one by one to him; 
as he will turn the leaves of his diary, or con- 
sult his calendar each morning when he 
reaches his office for the appointments of that 
day, and not of the day following, and give 
himself to their fulfillment — in like manner 
must he deal with the obstacles that through 
the year will threaten his spiritual advance. 
A spurt ahead, as if one were bound to run 
the gauntlet at once and be done with it, is 



158 Vision and Service 

the poorest possible start for a new year. Each 
day's temptations must be met by themselves, 
and that means persevering, instant prayer, 
a continuing purpose, renewing " the battle 
boldly every day," as the line of the old hymn 
phrases it. 

Oh, is there any lesson we need so much to 
learn — all of us — as that? Each tempta- 
tion met separately, each religious duty taken 
up when it comes and attended to then and 
there, no struggle passed through in advance, 
but the battles fought when they force them- 
selves upon us. One day at a time and each 
emergency or endeavor in its order! Adopt 
that rule, resolving soul, and your resolutions 
will be as strong on the thirty-first day of De- 
cember as they are on the first of January. 
Nay, far more so; for to-day they are mere 
hopes, promises, expectations ; then they will 
be achievements. 

" We mourn too much for our dead yesterdays, 
We dread too anxiously unborn to-morrows. 
To-day is ours for love, for joy, for praise, 

Yea, and for pains, perchance, and possible sorrows. 
To-day is ours for righteous living, 
For patience, kindness, most of all — thankgiving. 



One Step at a Time 159 

" Out of the grace divine it comes to us, 

A sweet, bright thing from darkling shadows creeping; 
A day with mercies multitudinous, 

And loves and duties always in its keeping; 
Whose opportunities, alas, are wasted, 
And sweetest things too often pass untasted." 



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